


Favor for Your Four-Chambered Heart

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Book/Movie Fusion, Alternate Universe - Human, Clones, F/F, Homeworld Gems - Freeform, Medical Procedures, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-26 22:41:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 77,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10796220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: "I don't get it," she says flatly."Don't get what?""You said we needed to be in peak physical form. What for?""Oh!" Peridot perks up. "For harvesting."[Never Let Me Go AU.]





	1. The Donor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [callunavulgari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/gifts).



> A gift for [Heather](http://callunavulgari.tumblr.com/), who for a meme ages ago asked for **Lapis Lazuli** and "roots, a haunting love song, and a stolen kiss," so I wrote the Homeworld Gems in a Never Let Me Go AU! Because it felt appropriate. This seems like a paltry thank you for the years of support and friendship you've given me, but I hope you like it! ♥︎ ♥︎
> 
> This also started out as a fill for [Jaspis Week 2](https://jaspisweek.tumblr.com/), **Day Three: Movie Night** , but I don't know if that counts b/c I'm, like, two months late at this point!
> 
> Familiarity with book or movie version of NLMG is _not_ required to understand this fic. Canon compliant with SU through **Gem Harvest** only! New characters appearing after that point bear no resemblance to their counterparts here.
> 
>  **Note** : while there is sex, the M rating is mostly there for the medical stuff. ( _I_ want needles to come with warnings at all times, so I figured you might, too.) On that note, please heed **warnings** for needles, blood, bodily functions, surgical procedures of several kinds, depictions of power imbalance and coerciveness in a relationship (and eventual tackling/management of those issues,) and minor character death. Dogs are briefly sad, but no dogs are harmed!
> 
>  
> 
> ... I think that's everything? Whew, I sure did put a lot of work into a super niche thing, but it's out there now! Please enjoy! :D

*

 

**The Cottages**  
**Year 19, Diamond Standard**

 

Jasper drags Lapis back kicking and screaming. Thistles and burrs cling to her skirt, her bare shins laced with red scratches. Her sandals she lost early on.

She’s wrenching her arm back and forth, alternating between digging her heels in and dropping like a dead weight, trying to loosen Jasper’s grip — there will be a fruit bowl’s worth of bruises around her bicep later. The noise brings Big T’s terriers to the fence, their tails held stiff and interested behind them. In the dark, their shapes become almost impossible to see, but Lapis can hear them scrabbling through the brush by the fence pickets, keeping pace.

The motion light comes on as Jasper’s boot hits the back porch, startling the moths and making them scatter. One bumbles right at Jasper’s face — she grunts, batting it away, and the movement yanks Lapis off-balance. Her foot comes down on empty air, and her shoulder screams with pain as it takes the brunt of her weight.

“Let _go!”_ she yells in outrage, getting her feet under her again and clawing at Jasper’s hand.

They bang into the cottage. 

She’s not surprised that their approach roused the other residents, a half-dozen girls in various stages of sleepwear who’ve crowded at the top of the stairs, peering over the banister. 

Jasper doesn’t slow down or spare them a glance. She drags Lapis around and slams her arm up against the chip reader, a fancy black piece of equipment mounted at eye level. With everything else in the cottages being second- and third-hand, it’s always looked out of place, ominous and new. More than once, Lapis has eaten breakfast across from it and imagined taking a baseball bat to the screen; if it’s fancy, then it’s got to be delicate, right?

For one heart-stopping moment, and then another, it remains blank. Then it beeps and turns green.

_Donor registered._

Immediately, the girls on the stairs vanish. All except Peridot, who drops into a crouch and presses herself as small as possible against the railing. The green light reflects off her wide eyes and makes the white scarring in the center of her forehead look ghoulish.

There’s no point in looking at the clock. Curfew was over an hour ago. This doesn’t even fall within an acceptable margin for lateness.

 _Better late than never,_ says the tightness in Jasper’s face, muscle leaping in her jaw.

If Lapis _never_ checked in — 

The chip reader blares and turns red, and the screen lifts off its mount and starts to expand.

Gulping down air like someone taking an unexpected plunge underwater, Lapis stops struggling, braces her bare heels, and jerks to attention. Jasper’s hand comes off her arm — for a second, the imprint of her fingers remain scored in white on her skin, before it flushes red to match the rest. Lapis snatches it up against her chest protectively — not that it will stop her from becoming a target again, should she try to make another break for it.

Jasper takes a sharp step off to the side, and stands there, quivering — like she, too, is fighting a hindbrain urge to flee to another room.

A Ruby’s face fills the screen.

“What’s this …” she mutters, eyes darting around the darkened interior of the cottage kitchen before they land on Lapis. Then, “Report.”

“Lapis —“ Lapis starts, but her voice is kindling and it snaps in her throat. She clenches handfuls of her skirt and tries again. “Lapis Lazuli 55.6, cut S22bk. Blue affiliate.”

Ruby states, “Lapis Lazuli,” and adjusts her headset.

She’s young, Lapis realizes — young enough that her fear ebbs back for a beat, and she wonders if they might have been in the same kindergarten class. Not at Hailsham, clearly, but in general. She’s got broad, clear features and beads knotted into her hair, and she squints at something off-screen with the care of someone unaccustomed to it.

“You are,” she checks, “one hour and forty-six minutes late reporting in for curfew. What is your excuse?”

Most of the delay was in the fight, probably, the one Lapis had kept feeding out of frustration until Jasper stopped responding, and then she clapped her hands over her ears and chanted, “look at me, look at me look at me look at me when I’m _talking to you,_ I am a _person_ and I deserve to be seen!”

 _”NO!”_ Jasper had roared back, looming over her abrupt and big and mean and grabbing at her the way you would a misbehaving child. It caught Lapis by surprise — it shouldn’t have, but it did.

“No, you are _not._ None of us are! If you don’t realize that soon, you’ll get killed and then there won’t be anything to look at at all!”

At which point Lapis kicked her and things dissolved rapidly from there.

She’d been trying to reach the shore. They were boats out there, she knew — or, well, she’d _heard._ Their old delivery driver had retired because he needed a liver transplant, and the new one had been complaining about it into his mobile phone as he carelessly dropped plastic totes off the back of his truck, indifferent to Lapis who was standing on the back porch with her skirt flapping around her knees, breathlessly hoping to be acknowledged. Her experience with strangers so far is woefully brief. But the Cottages are his last stop of the day and he’d mentally clocked out, parking the truck on the dun patch behind the houses that serves as a quad for its inhabitants, beaten-down paths snaking out towards each stoop.

She listened with fascination to his one-sided conversation, until it began to curdle and turn sour in her stomach.

She felt like she was watching him from the other side of a mirror, where she could see him but he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see her — 

It was as if a switch had flipped in her brain.

Suddenly, she wanted to fly at his face, beat him with her fists and shout, _why won’t you_ look _at me!_

_What’s wrong with you?_

_… what’s wrong with_ me?

But then he said: those renegade radio hosts hiding their cowardly heads in tugboats out at sea where the jurisdiction of the land doesn’t apply to them, thinking they can broadcast whatever they want, and Lapis felt it the way you feel a cold snap in winter, freezing in her nose and throat. She was moving before she was even consciously aware of making a decision. She went back through the house and didn’t even stop to change out of her house sandals, operating on some gut instinct that if she slowed down and tried to plan, to do _anything,_ then her resolve would melt at the seams. She needed it to stay singular and crystallized.

She pulled the front door closed behind her, clinging to the handle and bringing her forehead down to meet the wood for the briefest of moments, and —

Then she turned and started running.

Somewhere in her head, where she didn’t want to look at it directly the same way you shouldn’t look something in the eye when you’re dreaming, there was a thought: 

If there were laws that didn’t apply to radio hosts at sea, maybe they didn’t apply to donors at sea, either.

But she hadn’t anticipated just how _fast_ Jasper would be, tracking her down.

(That, it occurred to her part-way back, might have something to do with Peridot.)

“I,” her dry throat clicks, and she blinks hard so that she doesn’t look at Jasper, still hiding in the gloom to the side of the screen. “I went for a hike. I listened to my music. I lost track of time.”

It comes out blunt, bitten-off, the bones of actions picked clean of any meat.

“I walked too far. When I tried to hurry back, I fell.”

Ruby’s expression, which had started to go dull as she realized nothing interesting was forthcoming, suddenly sharpens.

“Were you — “

“I sustained no damage,” Lapis says, although her feet and stinging shins are clamoring otherwise. She keeps lying, “Abrasions, at most, but I had to stop and check. It made me even more late. It won’t happen again.”

There’s a long silence, while Ruby looks at something on a different screen, her mouth compressed. She repositions her headset and the audio — the slow sound of her inhaling, a nondescript chatter in the background — suddenly mutes, presumably while she consults with a superior. Lapis waits, unmoving, watching her lips move, and can only make out a word here or there. “Blue affiliate,” comes up more than once. Everyone knows Blue donors are nonaggressive. Not typically troublesome. They’re grouped by Affiliation for a reason: they’re too temporary to get to know individually, so it’s just better to have a highlight reel of characteristics to pull from, for situations like this.

“It’s your first offense,” Ruby says to her, startling her with how seamlessly she switches from silence to speaking. “We’re granting you temporary clemency. You’ll be put under house arrest until a carer can review your case.”

There is nothing to be said to that. Lapis is not _allowed_ to have anything to say to that, except, “Thank you.”

Bitterly, she snaps her hands together in a salute, and the chip reader shuts itself down.

It plunges them into sudden darkness — after staring at the glow of the screen for so long, Lapis has trouble distinguishing the shapes of the furniture, the mismatched dining chairs with the wicker coming apart. Even Jasper’s bulk, shifting, is nothing more than a suggestion, the outline of her eyes in the dark.

One beat passes, then another, and then she hears scuffling footsteps, descending rapidly.

She turns, and Peridot embraces her around the middle, fierce and trembling scared.

 

*

 

The first few nights Lapis spent at the Cottages she counts among the most miserable of her life to date.

Her attempted break came at the beginning of Ventis, two months after her arrival, but the whole season had started out cold. Just as they were graduating from the kindergartens, autumn relinquished its hold; all the colors cracking, giving way to the endless, churned-up brown of winter. The sky fossilized like that, greying to match the color of the salt dust that caked the sides of cars and dried to streaks on the roads. Lapis thought coming down south would mean it’d be warmer, but apparently all the tolerable places had already been claimed. This left the Cottages — several dark, toadish buildings hunched against the hills like lonely kids trying to keep their backs up against the wind. Lapis pressed up against the rattling window as the bus labored up the incline towards her new home — she looked at the debris blown into the chicken wire fencing, the tiny houses dashed on the ground and exposed to the sky, and tried not to feel bleak.

The bone-chill follows her, but it’s not just that. 

Everything’s so _old._

Hands have worn the finish off the staircase banisters, the wood buckled from the tread of a hundred steps. The paint’s nicked on all the appliances, and if it’s metal, it’s likely to be rusting; Lapis picks at the ring around the shower head, the bottom of the vacuum cleaner, frowning at the orange stains it leaves on her fingers. It’s not that she’s used to everything being _new,_ but …

It had just … been different at the kindergartens.

“Isn’t that what we wanted, though?” Peridot had asked when Lapis told her this. Her brow furrowed under its too-big visor. “I thought we were excited. It’s _new_ old stuff, Lapis.”

“It’s not _that,”_ Lapis said for what had to be the fourth time, then vented out a frustrated noise, because it was so many things at once.

The reality comes up underneath your feet at the Cottages, like Big T’s terriers when they think you’ve got food that you aren’t sharing. The fact is: each room gets recycled through donors, over and over, since each of them only stay for four years. That quilt folded neatly at the foot of her bed — who slept under it last? Who cried under it? Who curled up with a lover under it while the moonlight through the window made square-shaped patterns on the creaky, scuffed floors?

Who will do all these things after Lapis’s body is in pieces on a slab?

“It’s loneliness, babe,” said Little T. The difference between Big T and Little T is not size, Lapis finds out, since Little T is a Pink affiliate and it shows in the breadth of her shoulders, but rather age: Big T is two classes ahead of her.

Lapis just blinked.

She asked, “how could I be lonely?”, with a gesture that included the rest of their cottage’s inhabitants: Peridot and Carnelian, Fluorite and the older Tourmaline, Jasper and Citrine and Amber. Even Moonstone, although Lapis would still swear Moonstone had been made up if only she hadn’t seen her, passing through to swipe her wrist at the chip reader before disappearing over the fence to the boys’ cottages. Everyone uses her room to store their projects.

“Think about it,” the younger Tourmaline said.

Up until this point, Lapis had lived in a big dormitory at her kindergarten with all the same faces: they all had, it’s what you did.

First were the kindergartens, where you lived from toddling age to seventeen. Then came the cottages, where you lived from seventeen to twenty-one, and last came the wards, where you lived from your first donation until your completion, however long that took: days to months to years, it all depended on the fortitude of the donor and the quality of the carer.

For the first time in her life, Lapis was sleeping alone, quilt pulled up to her chin. She couldn’t get warm.

Sunrise was almost a blessing, coming through the curtains and striking her eyelids, and it gave her the excuse to rise and wash her face and go downstairs, where Little T was moving on bare feet with early-morning quiet, shaking dry kibble into tins for Big T’s terriers. 

Lapis gave her a curious look, and she smiled without teeth. “I never said it got easier,” and she pushed the cereal box across the counter.

 

*

 

For two days, after, Lapis dutifully sticks to the Cottages, swiping her wrist at the chip reader every time she comes in or out, even if she’s just going to the tool shed or across the quad to the north point cottage because Citrine said that the Aquamarine there has a twelve-pack of Pepsi, and Lapis can count on one hand the number of times she’s had a carbonated beverage. She dresses in long skirts with long ribbons, long sweaters with long sleeves — the novelty of this hasn’t quite worn off, that she could be wearing something that isn’t the Hailsham uniform. It doesn’t even matter that all these clothes came to them recycled, stretched out at the knees and too long on everybody — well, except for Jasper, maybe.

Whereas Lapis is the type of person who picks something and sticks with it until she tires of it or it tires her out, Peridot probably changed her clothes twice, three times a day at first — boxer briefs from someplace called “AREA 51”, a white tank top with a bow tie that she refused to put a sweater over because “it ruins the look, Lapis!”, although Lapis is pretty sure the blue lips aren’t part of the look. Having once been new too, the older residents watched all this without judgment — so long as you didn’t hoard the new stuff, you could wear whatever you wanted.

“Are you mad at me?” Peridot asks, as Lapis is filling up the sink — with suds first, mostly, then water. 

She steps in close to add more dishes to the basin, hiding her voice under the commotion of the others, who are debating whether the rest of the stew should go into the freezer for weekday lunches, or if they should take it to the other cottages to share.

(“Aquamarine said they got bad potatoes at her cottage this week,” Carnelian points out, already reaching for the pot handles. “Let’s do something nice for them.”

“Yeah. The stew’s not that good, I don’t want to be eating it all week.” That, of course, is Jasper.

“Well, _I_ liked it,” Amber protests, but uselessly — Carnelian’s already press-ganged the Tourmalines into helping her. There’s a skew to Amber’s mouth that says she looked at the cooking roster earlier: with no leftovers, making dinner for them all will be her task tomorrow.)

Lapis whips her hand through the bubbles, and gives herself a foam-white beard.

“Yes,” she says, and feels mean.

Hurt pinches the corners of Peridot’s mouth, crimping them like the wadded-up tissue no one wants to touch directly when cleaning. “I was _just_ trying to —“ she tries, but Amber accidentally shoves her chair back too far, and Peridot yelps as it catches the tender outside of her foot, and Carnelian says, “hey, yeah, the Homeworld girls can help — Lapis, Peridot, give us a hand, will you?” and whatever she was going to say is lost in the clamor of too many bodies in one small kitchen.

On the third day, the carer comes.

Every donor is assigned a carer when they leave the Cottages, but there’s no real rule for donors who are still _at_ the Cottages, so they must’ve sent whoever had a free block in her schedule. She’s a tall, athletic Sapphire who shows up on the front porch in nylon shorts that are too early for the season and a ready smile, like she can make warmer weather arrive through sheer force of will.

Physical evaluations had been as routine as classroom comprehension quizzes at Hailsham, with the more strenuous placement exams coming once a year. This feels more like the latter. Sapphire even checks her teeth.

As she’s sealing tubes of blood for analysis, she asks after the bruises.

“Jasper,” Lapis says honestly. “She found me when I was half-way back —“

A lie. She’d caught up to Lapis before she’d even reached the edge of town, and Lapis’s mistake had been to turn around and fight.

“— and we were both panicking by then. She’s big, you’ve seen her, right?”

“That’s no excuse,” Sapphire responds promptly. “If she’s bigger than you, that means it’s her responsibility to use her strength wisely, not yours to avoid getting hurt.”

Lapis shrugs. With the fingers of her other hand, she absently presses into the two-day old bruises just to feel them twinge; plum marks, grape fingerprints, blueberry smears coming up dark and veiny on the underside of her arm.

“Pink affiliates,” she says offhandedly. “You know how they get.”

Judging by Sapphire’s sudden attention, her guess had been correct: she’s Pink affiliated, too.

 _Snap,_ goes the kit as it seals.

“I’ll talk to her,” Sapphire promises, and under the cover of her fringe of hair, Lapis smiles.

Her fingers play up the accordion of bruises, and suddenly — it’s as if she’s seeing right through them to a hidden message underneath, like a magic-eye puzzle.

A plan takes shape. Just how many ways can she get Jasper back for what she put her through? She _wants_ to hurt her — once for each mark on her arm turning the same greeny color of undersea stone. How badly can she make Jasper regret it?

In the end, she gets a clean bill of health and a friendly lecture.

“ — the kindergartens were such a sheltering existence, there’s so much you don’t know about the world. You may not understand why they keep such close track of us,” she turns her wrist over, showing Lapis the dark mark where her own chip is. “But it’s important that we help them keep us safe!”

 _Also,_ Lapis thinks. _Because they sunk money into raising us and they haven’t farmed their investment yet._

“Yes, ma’am,” is all she says out loud.

Sapphire’s ponytail sways with her laugh. “You don’t need to call me that,” she swings her bag back over her shoulder. “I’m not that much older than you.”

Later, Lapis will develop an eye for being able to tell — after all, when everybody you know all falls within the same four-year age bracket, you get really good at determining which class someone is in based on little clues — but right now she’s seventeen, and all she knows is that carers get extra time before they start their donations. Sapphire might be the oldest donor she’ll ever meet — twenty-four, twenty-five or … maybe even twenty-six?

She promises she’ll be careful, and Sapphire leaves.

Eight hours later, Lapis sneaks out.

Three days on house arrest have given her time for what she needs to do — where the motion lights are most feeble, what steps don’t creak as much. Which direction is the best to get to the road.

Her toes slip forward in her too-large boots, the tongues pressing down on her not-yet-healed scratches. Above her head, the sky is a formidable layout of stars — those, at least, are the same stars she and Peridot looked at from Hailsham’s concrete roof. 

She gets as far as the chicken wire fence, the plastic bags thrown up against them and torn to ribbons, their scraps shivering like tiny white ghosts in the moonlight, before a voice speaks.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Lapis jumps a mile, then curses.

“Jasper?”

A penlight clicks on, and that bright pinprick flare in the dark makes Lapis hiss and fling up a hand to protect herself.

“You little brat,” she hears Jasper say, with something close to admiration.

Around the beam of light pointed right at her, it’s difficult to distinguish what’s the bulk of Jasper’s body and what’s her coat and hood and hair. But Lapis has a handle on this now, she’s got something to fight for and a direction to go in.

She heard Sapphire yelling at Jasper: they all had. 

_— act like you just got that pink diamond yesterday. You’ve got to_ earn _that emblem on your sleeve, with your actions and your heart, and that is_ not _what you did to that girl!_

(That’s not quite fair, because if she’s a girl, then surely Jasper is, too — they’re in the same class. But Lapis has only just started to figure it out: she is smaller and less offensive than Jasper, more harmless-looking, and in a game of “who are they going to believe?”, she’s going to win.)

(This thought will ambush her, years from now, while she’s standing in this very spot — it will come up behind her and seal its hands around her arms, rooting her in place. She watches Jasper thrash, raging, “ _NO,_ you're lying, she's _lying,_ let me _go!”_ and wonders when it’s going to start feeling like a victory.)

With a confidence she doesn’t quite feel, she says, “If you want me back by curfew, you’re just going to have to come with me.”

 

*

 

**Hailsham**  
**Year 13, Diamond Standard**

 

The kindergarten where Lapis and Peridot spent the first seventeen years of their life had, in its first incarnation, been a travel center servicing sightseers on their way to the Chalk Cliff Falls. It boasted an outdoor picnic area, an interactive diorama of the Falls themselves, and a strip mall cluster of storefronts that cycled through tenants frequently enough that it was never hard to see the shape of an old store’s sign in the brick under the new one.

However, some fifty, fifty-five years ago, government contractors built a roadway to the coast that made the Falls easier to access, and traffic through the area turned anemic, then trickled off entirely, leaving the travel center as husked-out and carefully preserved as a bug pinned to a collector’s board. The medical breakthrough, happening simultaneously, created a call for kindergartens that swallowed up any land standing empty: many of them got built in stranger places than this. Hailsham dug up the dead center’s bones and animated them again, but you can still see the ghost in the architecture underneath; the awning from the filling station standing sentry over the front lot, the awkward way the old storefronts looked, trying to be offices and classrooms.

Of course, Lapis didn’t have any context for this — to her, the whole world was Hailsham and its surrounding countryside. Even the Chalk Cliff Falls, themselves only seven miles to the north, weren’t _real._ Not really.

“If we petition all the guardians, do you think they’ll take us?” Peridot asks.

“Petition” had been on Caretaker Lauren’s list of vocabulary words, in between “menagerie” and “sedentary.” It will be on Friday’s test.

“What,” says Lapis. “Like, for Field Day?”

Peridot’s eyes brighten with enthusiasm. “Yeah, that’d be perfect!” she says, and turns her clipboard to make a note in the margin of her paper. She looks pretty funny like that, standing shin-deep in water and trying to keep her paper dry, and Lapis wonders how mad she’ll be if she splashes her.

The diorama’s more of a fountain, really, a smaller-scale replica of Chalk Cliff Falls. According to the faded text mounted on a nearby plinth, the Falls are an excellent spot for photography and something called “parasailing.” You get natural phenomenon like that happening in places where the river plane meets the start of the cliffs, and the sudden change in soil composition drops the river like an undercooked cake collapsing inward. The result is a series of waterfalls, cascading like staircases in rock.

Theoretically, everyone gets equal time splashing in the Falls, but Lapis at eleven has a flat, reptilian stare that she’s been practicing, and a watery dominion that’s so far been unchallenged.

She levels it on Peridot. “I think that’s too far out of bounds. They can’t risk it.”

Peridot makes a thoughtful noise, but otherwise doesn’t move.

“Logistical nightmare,” she decides, and Lapis is reluctantly impressed: she doesn’t remember that from the vocab list, and she’s not sure what it means, except that Peridot swings it around with the same easy confidence some of the girls take up baseball bats at sports time. “Too many of us, too few caretakers to keep watch. Who’s to say there won’t be an ambush? We could be snatched up and sold on the black market just like that!” She snaps her fingers, and then her eyes glint, “or they’ll harvest us right there, and hang our bodies one by one on the perimeter fence!”

“Now you’re just making stuff up,” says Lapis, backing herself up into the waterfall — it pounds on her scalp and shoulders, curtaining her hair. The stale smell of algae assaults her nose. “What’s harvesting?”

“I’m not sure,” Peridot admits. “I heard one of the caretakers say it after last exam season, about how we’ll all need to be in peak physical form. For when they harvest us.”

“Hmm,” says Lapis, and decides that since the harvesting doesn’t seem to be _imminent,_ then she has bigger concerns.

“ _Lapis!”_

Peridot’s squawk of outrage is as satisfying as Lapis thought it would be; she reels backwards, and then has to pinwheel her arms to keep from toppling over onto the pavement. Water soaks the front of her uniform, forming great blotches on her clipboard, which she looks at and then starts waving around in a panic.

Emerging from the waterfall, hair dripping down the front of her face, Lapis raises her arms and commands in her best sea witch voice, “Get out of my pool!”

Peridot throws her a filthy look.

“ _Wow,”_ she says, in a way that means the exact opposite.

 

*

 

Before then, Lapis had rarely interacted with Peridot outside of when they had to for class — picked for the same sports team, the same trivia team, or paired under Caretaker Ian’s supervision to practice their scripts, Peridot traipsing pigeon-toed across the front of the classroom to plonk down a stack of books and a bent piece of cardboard that’s supposed to be a library card, Lapis tapping at an unplugged keyboard pretending to be a librarian, while Caretaker Ian coaches them through the lines — because friendship had more to do with proximity than anything, and the “L”s weren’t usually close enough to the “P”s for that to apply.

Then, at age eleven, they’re given their Affiliation.

It’s the most important part of being eleven, the way the scoliosis doctor’s visit is for twelve or surgery is for being fourteen. 

Your Affiliation determines how you can expect to be treated and how you’re expected to behave from this point forward, which is all very serious and whatever, but mostly it just means everybody gets a new patch on their uniforms and different arrangements in the dormitories. That’s much more exciting.

It takes Lapis ten minutes to decide that she hates everyone else Blue affiliated. She sits on her bedspread and picks at her iron-on patch, listening to the others talk about the array of treasures they’re putting on their nightstands and how much closer this puts them to the kitchens, even though none of them moved _that_ far. The blue diamond refuses to peel up, not even in the corner.

So she sighs, straightens her pinafore, pulls up her socks, and goes to find a new friend.

In the bathroom, she trips over Peridot.

“ _Sorry!”_ Peridot squeaks, jerking her boots up to her chest.

“It’s okay,” Lapis says quickly, regaining her balance, and “— why are you hiding in the shower?”

It’s a guess — there are only so many reasons you’d find someone in a shower stall fully-clothed — but it’s spot on. Peridot wraps her arms around her knees and busies herself with avoiding Lapis’s eyes. Her voice comes out reluctant and piecemeal, like it’s being grated off a block.

“Because there used to be bathtubs, but they got rid of those.” Her nose scrunches. “It’s hard to read in a high-efficiency shower.” 

Lapis blinks. Slowly, careful of damp patches, she puts her back against the wall opposite Peridot and slides down to the tile. She doesn’t know what “high-efficiency” means, but it sounds intimidating. Peridot’s eyes track her, and Lapis is abruptly reminded of the mouse that Chalcedony found under the floorboards in Caretaker Earl’s classroom; how its protuberant nose twitched frantically even when they all tried to be as non-threatening as possible.

Everything about Peridot is small for her age — her feet and her hands, her nose and her eyes, which are constantly squinting at everything from behind the big plastic visor she wears, like the kind you get when you’ve had your eyes dilated during exams, except Peridot’s are permanent. She would look a lot less funny if she had proper glasses, but they don’t make corrective lenses in the kind she needs.

(Well, they _do,_ but not for donors. She finds that out later.)

“Why do you read in the bathrooms?” she asks. “We’ve got a library.”

The grating in Peridot’s voice gets even more aggressive, like it’s gone after a particularly rough block of cheese. 

“Why do you _think?”_

Lapis looks her up and down.

On another day, she might have been tempted to parrot what the other kids say. _They only go after you because you give them a reaction. You make yourself a target by being so weird, you know, but if you just change your behavior, try to blend in more, they’ll leave you alone._

But there’s a blue diamond patch on her uniform now, and a yellow one on Peridot’s. That’s not bad — at least she’s not White affiliated. Lapis would never willingly hang out with that kind of insufferable know-it-all.

Besides, she knows it’s wrong. It’s the other kids’ fault, not Peridot’s — it’s _their_ behavior that should change.

“You know what helps me?” she offers, with all her eleven-year-old wisdom. “Laughing at them.”

“That doesn’t help at all!” Peridot protests, surfacing at last from behind her knees.

“Why not?”

“Because — because — because I’m too _mad!”_ She throws her hands up in frustration, and the grater in her throat grinds itself to the point of snapping. “There, I said it. I’m mad, and I want them to know that I’m mad and I want them to be sorry.”

“I didn’t say it would be _easy,”_ Lapis huffs. “But it’s not easy being mad, either. You can’t, like, _explain_ yourself when they’re busy taunting you. Or, I can’t, anyway — I’m too mad to explain _why_ I’m mad! So when someone’s yelling at me, I wind up yelling back and then they get all —“ She demonstrates, drawing herself up and adopting a self-satisfied expression, not yet having the vocabulary for “smug.” “And then I have to hurt them, and then I definitely lose.”

“They started it,” Peridot tells her, with the assurance of someone with no practical experience in hurting other people. “It’s not hurting them if they hurt you first.”

“I don’t think that’s right,” Lapis allows, and then shrugs it off. “But if _you_ laugh at them, then _they_ get mad because you’re not doing what they want, and then _they_ lose.”

Peridot digests this slowly, her eyes narrowed. Lapis isn’t sure if this is a thoughtful squint, or a normal Peridot squint.

“Ha. Ha,” she says.

The faucets could squeak and it would be a more genuine laugh than that, but Lapis smiles anyway. Peridot was always horrible to be partnered with for scripts, too, but she’s sure they can work on this one.

They’re best friends from that moment on.

 

*

 

At fourteen, they take turns playing the role of each other’s carer following their appendectomies.

Peridot did a lot of reading beforehand, but Lapis won’t find out until later (at the library in town by the Cottages, while she’s looking through pamphlets for something else entirely and behind her, Jasper fishes in her coat pockets for a penny to send coasting down the plastic tubes attached to the Make-a-Wish bin, and Peridot continues to be horrible at scripts by having no idea which card is the library card) that for … well, for _other_ people, they only get their appendix removed in case of an emergency.

For donors, it's routine. Lapis always assumed the only reason they put a biologically useless organ like the appendix in was for the sole purpose of taking it back out again. For practice!

It’s an easy surgery and it prepares them for later, so the recovery centers can have that information on file — how well they react to anesthesia, if there’s any fear of blood or needles (which isn’t a practical fear for any of them to have, honestly,) how receptive they are to which track of post-surgery care, etc. Everyone gets their turn being the patient, and everyone gets their turn being a carer. “L”s go before “P”s, so Lapis goes before Peridot, and in the days after the surgery, Peridot fetches water and helps her change ice packs and otherwise gets very annoying, very quickly.

“This isn’t as exciting as I thought,” she tells Lapis, who licks her dry mouth and slants her eyes open to look at her. Peridot sits on the edge of her stool, attentive, and on the other side of the mint-green curtain, she can just make out the sounds of some younger Hailsham class, going through evaluations. The voices of the doctors and nurses rise and fall among the little-kid chatter.

She says, “A carer’s job is to keep me on time for my appointments and to keep me calm.”

“You’re _always_ calm,” Peridot replies, exasperated.

“When I have the energy to not be calm, I’ll let you know. Until then, it’s not worth the effort.”

When it’s Peridot’s turn, she gets smaller and quieter, hunching around herself underneath the bedsheet. The month of Mortalis is almost over; the wind is a persistent howling outside the window. The diorama of the Falls outside has been covered with plastic tarp and nothing moves out there, not even the leaves frozen to the ground.

“It hurts,” she mumbles, shivering.

Lapis diligently checks the clock. “You’ve got two hours and twenty minutes until I can give you more medicine.”

“It’s not that,” Peridot moves her head on her pillow in her best attempt at shaking it. Her hair, which normally swoops up from her head like the back-end of a duck, is unkempt from where she’s tossed and turned on it. “They took a part of my body out, Lapis. I knew they were going to, but then they did it. It was mine and now it’s _not_ anymore.” She isn’t meeting Lapis’s eyes. “Is this what it’s going to be like?”

“I … I don’t know, Peridot.”

Thanks to the renegade Pearl, they both know exactly what all this is training them for.

That doesn’t make it any easier to talk about.

What would it have been like, she wonders, if they hadn’t been in Pearl’s class when she told them about the war, the medical breakthrough, the Diamonds? If they didn’t know about donations — about _harvesting_ — until they left for the Cottages.

A trap like that, Lapis thinks, to have ignorance be your bars, lock, and key — to never know that not every child in the world lives the same way they do, that all their scripts are only teaching them solutions to temporary needs, only to learn it all at once …

She clenches her fists in her lap.

What a horrible prison that would make.

 

*

 

On the last week of the Standard year, they get called into Caretaker Rebecca’s office to discuss their graduation from Hailsham.

Caretaker Rebecca has the same title all the other teachers have, but everyone knows she’s in charge — she does morning announcements and oversees the yearly exams, and all the others look to her the same way Agate became the spokesperson for Lapis’s class, simply by being the most popular. Lapis has always liked her. She didn’t try to cover up what the renegade Pearl did, simply stood at the podium in front of the assembly, wiped down her glasses, and said, “I’m sorry to announce that Caretaker Earl is no longer with us. Should any of you like to discuss what she has told you, myself, the caretakers and guardians are all available to you.”

Even now, as Lapis sits down in the chair in front of her desk, sweeping her threadbare uniform skirt down to get it to cover her thighs, Caretaker Rebecca smiles at her, and Lapis knows she’s going to say — 

“Lapis Lazuli,” like the rest of it doesn’t matter, which edition she is or that she’s a S Lapis instead of an M Lapis or an XL Lapis. Everyone else asks — the doctors, the nurses, even some of the guardians who should know better by now — but not Caretaker Rebecca. All she needs is that single identifier to know them. “Peridot.”

“Ma’am,” Peridot replies. 

One of the ears to her visor is bent because a boy sat on it during scripts — accidentally, he claims — and out of the corner of her eye, Lapis can see Peridot’s hands fidgeting, and in thirty seconds, she’s going to reach up and try to press it flat. Lapis has told her twice today that it’s not noticeable until she calls attention to it, and then it’s pretty obvious that she’s lopsided.

Fortunately, Caretaker Rebecca speaks, distracting them both. 

“You arrived here at Hailsham when you were too small to remember, and we’ve done all we can for you in the time that you were here,” and her smile widens, growing warmer. “But now the time has come to send you on. At the start of the new Standard year, we’ve arranged for the buses to come and take you to the Cottages.

“I know this is your first journey into the world beyond Hailsham’s gates, but I don’t doubt that either of you will be anything less than exemplary reflections of the values Hailsham has instilled in you.”

Peridot’s back is ramrod straight. Lapis slouches down.

“Ma’am,” Peridot bursts out, too impatient to wait for the spiel to wind to a close. “I heard that we’re going to have jobs at the Cottages?”

She squirms as she says it, dodging Lapis’s elbow with the ease of practice, and Caretaker Rebecca lifts her eyebrows. She looks first to Peridot, and then at Lapis, who folds her arms over her blouse - the diamond indicating her Affiliation moved to the top button when they outgrew the pinafores, and Lapis reluctantly buttoned it up before coming in here. She can feel the weight of it in the hollow of her throat.

 _Yes,_ she says to Caretaker Rebecca with her eyes. _She’s always like this._

Peridot as a teenager is exhausting, changing personalities and outlooks almost as quickly as it occurs to her that she can — like a song with multiple parts and she’s trying to sing them all simultaneously. With only weeks left to their so-called childhood, everything she hasn’t done or been or said has become a source of panic. If she doesn’t try it on, how does she know if it’s going to fit?

And Lapis — whose response to unexpected hormonal surges and bad skin is to shut down, pretend they’re not happening, and wait for it all to be over — almost wishes there was somebody else in this friendship who could help her keep all these different Peridots straight.

But — 

Just as quickly, she hopes that never happens.

She knows Peridot best out of everyone at Hailsham, out of everyone on this planet. She’s too jealous to give that up.

(Her mistake, later, is not realizing that this goes both ways — that Peridot knows her, too. That she could be valuable enough to Peridot that Peridot doesn’t want to share, either.)

Caretaker Rebecca folds her hands on her desktop and leans forward.

“Your primary job,” she says, low and with assurance, “is and will always be to take the best possible care of yourselves. You are more precious than gemstones, never forget that,” and she leans back again, tapping the end of her stylus against her mousepad in a thoughtful rat-a-tat. “But there are options. You can apply to be a carer, or a guardian — that training will keep you busy all four years.”

Lapis and Peridot exchange a look. “Carer,” implies, well, _caring,_ and that’s not exactly their strong suit. Nor are they tough enough to be guardians.

Seeing this, Caretaker Rebecca continues smoothly, “All Cottages will need maintenance and upkeep — you can do that. Some of the local chapters will need seasonal help, and online work is available to anyone who can use a keyboard, which I know you can. It’s true that you’ll be at the Cottages longer than we intended — “

“Why is that?” Peridot jumps in, and Lapis’s head comes up, interested.

To her credit, Caretaker Rebecca doesn’t attempt to deflect.

“There was an … incident, many years ago now, involving several students of the kindergartens and the war, and the change to Diamond Standard — which is how we at the Cottages, the kindergartens, and the recovery centers now keep track of time,” she glosses this over with a wave of her hand. “It’s not important, but afterwards, the Authority decided that seventeen was simply too young to start donations. People hear ‘seventeen’ and they think of their own children, and nobody wants to accept a kidney from someone who could be their child. So the legal date for the first donation was pushed back to twenty-one, which meant our system now had to provide for our donors for another four years.”

She shrugs a shoulder, and smiles.

“Hence the Cottages,” she says. “Now, where do you want to go?”

 _That’s a stupid question,_ is Lapis’s immediate thought. If they’ve never left Hailsham, how are they supposed to know where they want to go?

Just as quick, however, she realizes she already knows the answer.

Out loud, Peridot says, “By the city.”

“By the Falls,” Lapis says. “The real Falls.”

“Together?” Caretaker Rebecca asks.

They say, together, “Yes,” and she rises from behind her desk. The projector’s running, throwing a map of the country up against the whiteboard behind her, and the marker cap squeaks as she twists it off. She stands there, drumming the butt of the marker against her chin and contemplating all the starred places that indicate a collection of Cottages. Many of the stars already have names written by them — Agate and Amethyst, Topaz and Titanium.

Lapis spots Hailsham, up by the cliffs, a wide natural formation that turns the coastline as ragged as if it had been nibbled on by mice. The Chalk Cliff Falls are a great blue blotch a few miles inland. 

“There aren’t any Cottages by the Falls,” Caretaker Rebecca tells them gently, and taps the Hailsham point, before she traces her fingertip down, down, as far south as the roads will go. She taps one star, empty of anybody’s names. “But here. There’s a town for you, Peridot. And it’s by the sea, and I think you’ll like the sea, Lapis.”

Down their names go, side-by-side.

 

*

 

**The Cottages**  
**Year 19, Diamond Standard**

 

“Why do you call it Homeworld?” Lapis asks on their fourth night, while they’re all standing in the kitchen.

It’s still jarring, how completely unlike the bleached, spacious Hailsham canteen this is, with every manner of chair shoved into the space to accommodate as many people as possible. The sitting room with the TV is the same: squashed-up loveseats and bean bags and one corduroy sofa with the stuffing coming out, crammed close enough together that you have to climb over the others and their occupants to get in and out.

Amber’s at the stove, fluffing eggs in a skillet, and she says “hmm?”

Lapis glances around. Amber and Big T are the oldest residents present, with one year left before they start their donations, and they’ve taken it upon themselves to show the new rotations how to do meal prep. They’d done the basics at kindergarten, of course, peeled potatoes and chopped vegetables and sorted out creamer and sugar for tea, but it often broke down after that: how does one go from diced-up onions to food on a plate? How does a kettle work? How are they supposed to know which oven directions to follow on a bag of frozen Tater Toooooooots (which are supposedly even worse for you than Chaaaps, which is why they love them) when there are several different directions depending on your oven type?

She says, “Hailsham,” and beside her, Peridot presses them together, arms and hips and elbows, and studies the toes of her boots - today, they’re not canvas or leather, but a type of vinyl that’s iridescent as soap bubbles.

“Hailsham,” she says again, when nobody else says anything. “You keep calling Peridot and I the ‘Homeworld girls’ when we’re from Hailsham. Why? It’s just another kindergarten.”

She looks at Carnelian, who came in fresh with them. There are four of them in this rotation, and a scaly part of Lapis’s brain notes that’s one for each Affiliation: her and Peridot as Blue and Yellow, Jasper for Pink, Carnelian for White.

“Do all the kindergartens have funny nicknames?” she persists, ignoring the way the silence in the kitchen is getting kind of loud. “Why is Hailsham ‘Homeworld’?”

_Bang!_

One of the chairs crashes into another, but it’s just Jasper, standing up, and when Jasper decides to fill a space, others have to make room.

“ _Because,”_ she grinds out. 

She’s too big for almost all the clothes that had been waiting for them in the upcycle bin when they arrived, so she had to cross the fence to the boys’ cottages. Her jeans and windbreaker are noticeably mannish compared to everyone else in the room. She’s got a smashed-in face that’s hard to look at, with a jaw too broad to be anything but ugly and a crooked nose that never healed from some childhood break, and a great mass of hair she uses to cover all of this from sight. Lapis blinks rapidly — Jasper hasn’t spoken to her or Peridot directly yet.

“Because,” and her voice is bitter and low. “It’s this alien planet that we all wish we’d come from. You don’t even _know_ how lucky you are, do you?”

 

*

 

**Strawberry Fields Recovery Center, Delmarva**  
**Year 23, Diamond Standard**

 

There’s a Ruby in her ward that everybody calls Eyeball so as not to get her confused with the Ruby that’s her carer, called Doc, and the first time Jasper speaks to her, it’s after she tears out her IV and stomps across the linoleum so that she can stand at the foot of Jasper’s cot and announce, “I still have both kidneys.”

Jasper turns the radio down. “Bullshit,” she says.

“No, it’s true,” Eyeball says cheerfully, and turns around to demonstrate, propping her hands on her hips.

She’s not wearing anything except a pair of jeans and suspenders to hold them up, the bands of which are wide enough to cover her nipples if Eyeball was making a single, solitary attempt to do so, which she is not. As is, as she spins back around, Jasper can see no abdominal scarring, beyond the tiny hook-shaped appendectomy one they’ve all got, like secondary belly buttons.

“They wanted my bone marrow for my first donation,” she confides. “What about you?”

“That’s cheating. If I tell you, you’ll have an advantage the next time we all play Bluff.”

Eyeball dismisses this with a click of her tongue.

“It’s a stupid game anyway,” she declares. “Just a bunch of dopes sitting around in the rec room bragging about how many holes they’re walking around with and how you can hardly tell.”

Jasper looks at her, then brags, “One kidney. Half of my liver.”

Her eyebrows vault up in response, and she lets out a low whistle.

“Double donation?” she says with involuntary admiration, and this is _exactly_ why they all get together to play Bluff every time there’s a new rotation of donors coming into the recovery center. In spite of themselves, they all want acknowledgement. _Yes, it’s awful, thank you, but I’m doing so well you can hardly tell, right? I’m doing my job the way the kindergartens raised us to._ “You must have really pissed someone off to get that right out of the gate!”

It ambushes her, and Jasper says “yeah,” rough with surprise. 

And she looks down, blinking fast to clear the image of Lapis leaning over her, hair hanging down, the glint of her teeth in the dark like a cage. 

“Yeah, you could say that.”

Eyeball turns her head in a manner not dissimilar to a cockatiel that Jasper saw once on a show, trying to get a better look at Jasper with her one good eye.

She drags in a deep inhale, and Jasper thinks she’s going to say something, but then she comes out with: “Whatcha listening to?”

Her shoulders come down. “Beach City Radio,” she answers, and reaches for the volume knob again. “It’s the Pizza twins DJing now. They do the work hour, keep people moving during that last hour of their day.” She doesn’t know what it’s like, of course, having never worked an office job, but, “They’re good.”

“Yeah,” Eyeball agrees, offhand. “But do you know what’s better?”

She sidles around the end of Jasper’s cot, rolling her IV hook-up out of the way, and when she reaches for the dial — casually, without even asking — all of Jasper’s hackles go up at once.

“ _Woah!”_ Eyeball backs up smartly. “Easy!”

Another step back, and then she wipes her hands down on her jeans, as if to prove she didn’t touch Jasper’s things, and goes back to studying her, squint-eyed.

“I didn’t take you Homeworld donors to be possessive,” she starts, and Jasper feels herself flare up, faster than a match striking. The older you get, the more aware you become of just how badly rage can make your insides hurt: Jasper’s gone around most of her life with this stew in her belly, alternating hot and cold.

“I’m _not,”_ she says like blunt-force trauma. “From Homeworld. _Got it?”_

Eyeball’s expression doesn’t change.

Jasper licks her lips. Looks down at her hands on her bedspread. Looks up.

“I’m from the kindergarten at Beta.”

“Ahhhh,” Eyeball releases her breath in a slow hiss, and the corners of her mouth curl up, satisfied. Jasper gets the feeling she just admitted to something besides just where she was grown. “Now _that_ explains some things.”

 

*

 

The door to the ward slides open with the click of a lock releasing, and Jasper cracks an eye open, expecting it to be the Ruby called Doc or one of the nurses, or even Bloodstone, who’s notorious for her inability to sit still, walking up and down every corridor that will open for her like she can march the rest of her life away, just drum it straight out of her so she can finally sit down and get some _rest._

Instead, it’s Peridot, swiping her wrist at the chip reader.

Jasper comes to attention, eyes zeroing it on the little plastic bag dangling from her wrist.

“What’s that?” she demands.

“It’s not for you,” Peridot says promptly, coming around the end of her cot, stopping only to check the chart in its holder. It wasn't anything major, just one of the minimal-invasion surgeries that are pretty common between donations, but Jasper knows what it will say: _exemplary. minimal nausea or abdominal bruising. rapid recovery expected,_ and she lifts her chin, because she is nothing short of the best. Peridot pushes her big circular lenses up, squints at the minuscule writing, and then with a huge sigh, flops down in the plastic chair at Jasper’s bedside.

She pulls out a bag of panda wafers, peels the receipt away and tosses in the trash. “Dark chocolate,” she promises, and sets them on the bedside table next to Jasper’s radio and her paint cup (not to be confused with her drinking cup.) Her knuckles knock against a pendant on a chain, deep dark blue dotted with flecks like midnight stars. Her eyes blink, slow.

“If those aren’t for me - “ Jasper threatens.

Snorting, Peridot takes her hand off the blue pendant and kicks one boot over the other. “Like I would waste my time.”

“Who’s it for, then?” She sits forward, and continues persistently, “Is it for Tourmaline? I can’t believe it, you’re delivering treats for Tourmaline, you traitorous little - “

“ _Language,”_ Peridot choruses over her, sounding happy about it. “And Little T did not deign to ask me to be her carer, so I have no idea who’s fetching her dark chocolate these days.”

Jasper tries to remember if they were close. “Did she even know you became a carer?”

“She knows I went for the training, but I don’t think she believed it would stick.” Peridot props her chin on her balled-up fist, and regards Jasper for a long moment. “You didn’t either, though, did you?”

Caught, Jasper shrugs. 

“Thought you just wanted the car,” she admits, shifting her weight and trying to hide how it tugs on her scars. “And you were willing to trick the Authority to get one. Besides, you’re my carer now, aren’t you?”

“ _Ugh,”_ Peridot agrees, but she’s smiling. 

Jasper’s probationary status meant her typical right to pick her own carer was void, so she had no legal standing with which to refuse when Peridot put herself forward, but it didn’t feel _real_ — that she was donating, and Peridot of all people would see her through it — until Peridot bashed her face in with her own IV pole.

That had been after her first donation. A double-donation, but not a difficult one, as these things go. Kidney and partial-liver removals were routine enough to be boring, so they’re almost always the first to go when it's time to start donating. And strangely — for all that everything in her life had been leading her to this moment — Jasper hardly noticed. Betrayal hurt worse than the post-surgery ache. The pain of it was a fresh incision every time she opened her eyes and remembered she was somewhere new — the _last_ somewhere new that she would ever see — with all her bridges burnt. Lashing out didn’t help, but it was something she could _do,_ snarling and ungrateful and hurtling hateful things at even the most long-suffering of nurses, and _that_ lasted until they called Peridot back from another recovery center and said, _deal with her._

When she arrived, she dragged Jasper out for a stroll down the hall. Jasper could only manage it bent over a walker, breathing hard, but it brought her down to Peridot’s height.

And that made it easy to start needling her.

First about her glasses, which weren’t much of an improvement over the visor she’d worn at the Cottages, and then about Yellow affiliates in general, and then about her driving, because someone on one of those TV shows once had made a crack about women who drive and it had hurt when he said it, so that meant it would hurt in real life, too. 

But it wasn’t until she reached and — feeling sick to her stomach, knowing she was going too far but completely unable to stop — said, “Did Lapis leave you behind, too?” that she got a reaction.

Peridot stopped dead. 

Eyes focused on some point down the hall, she reached out, grabbed Jasper’s tug-along IV pole, and yanked it backwards, hard enough to pull painfully at the needles under Jasper’s clothes. Like a dog whose collar got jerked, Jasper staggered back with an expletive.

At which point Peridot turned and, very calmly, shoved the pole forward again, smashing it into Jasper’s face.

“Oh, shit,” said the Chalcedony in the wheelchair at the end of the hall.

The Sapphire beside her didn’t even look up, just tugged her fingers through her hair and said solemnly, “Saw that coming.”

“I can,” Peridot had said without remorse, in that calm carer voice, “and _will_ refer you to another carer who will not be as patient as I. So make your choice right now, Jasper 55.1, cut XL8cv. Me, the last friendly face you will ever know, or nothing but strangers for the rest of your miserably short life.”

Jasper sucked at the blood blooming between her teeth, staring.

Finally:

“Those are my only options?” she’d said.

But of course they were. They’re the only options _any_ donor has, no matter what kind of life they led: all the Jaspers and Peridots, all the Moonstones and Bloodstones, all the Tourmalines big and little, all the Lapis Lazuli, they all came down to this: watched over by a carer, and then, once they'd done one donation too many — 

Completion.

At that point, security arrived to investigate, but it was clear they had no idea who to restrain; Peridot barely came up to their shoulders, even puffed-up as she was, and their visible hesitation was enough to make her snap.

“ _What!”_ she’d yelled. “Her face is a disaster already, look at it, I’m not doing it any harm! Okay, yes, _fine,_ I’m leaving. She can walk herself back to the ward.”

Blinking at her now, the corner of Peridot’s mouth hooks and tugs, like she knows what Jasper’s thinking about.

“I came back, the next day,” she says. “Do you remember that?”

Jasper grins. “My bedmate —“ not Eyeball or Bloodstone or any of the ones she’s got now, but someone else, “— told me you were going to electrocute me in the shower.”

Peridot’s brows spring apart, surprised. “Why didn’t I think of that!”

Jasper laughs.

Grinning back at her, Peridot uncrosses her legs and sits up, reaching for the package of panda wafers and popping it open. She offers the bag to Jasper.

“You invited yourself along as escort on our mission when we were seventeen,” she reminds her. “If you didn’t want my friendship, you should have stayed home.”

 

*

 

Beta Kindergarten hadn’t been anything like Homeworld, a fact Jasper thinks Hailsham students are usually the last to figure out.

As a wheel in the grand medical machine, Beta was always aware of the guillotine at its neck, the pressure to churn out high-quality donors out of increasingly low-quality stock, and wasn’t above opening its doors to outsiders for fundraising purposes — bake sales, art galleries, music concerts, whatever the Caretakers thought they could get children to pull off. They usually posted Jasper up front during these, since she was the best-looking specimen they had to offer, without question — until she got her nose beat in and there wasn’t any money to fix a body part she wasn’t going to donate anyway.

Even now, twenty years and a hundred miles away, they still follow her into sleep: those people and the kind of remarks she was supposed to reflexively smile at.

_Oh, honey, look at the precious donor children! What are they selling? Let’s pick something out._

How the word rankles.

 _Donors._ Everyone calls them that, like somehow they think that’s more polite than calling them what they are: locally-grown meat, their parts indistinguishable from packaged chicken pieces at the grocer’s. Human organs for purchase, incubated inside bodies that occasionally do cute things like walk and talk and hold bake sales, until it’s time for harvest.

All her life, Jasper’s known what it took Lapis and Peridot thirteen years to find out:

They’re clones, every last one of them. Jasper and Lapis and Peridot, all the Rubies, and the Tourmalines, too. They were grown so that people better and richer than them could use their lives to prolong their own, replacing their organs with donated ones as they wore theirs out. Jasper and everyone she knows may only live to twenty-five, but that means the humans in the outside world can live well past 100.

So, yes. Let’s pick something out, honey.

 

*

 

**The Cottages**  
**Year 19, Diamond Standard**

 

When Jasper comes in with her the next morning at breakfast, Peridot looks up from the blender and visibly double-takes. The wide-eyed look she throws Lapis would be almost comical if Lapis were in a laughing mood, because nobody's really made a secret of how difficult it is to share the limited kitchen space with Jasper, between her size and her bad manners, and after the first week, she came barreling down for breakfast after everyone else was done.

“Babe!” Little T snaps her fingers in the vicinity of Peridot’s face, trying to get her attention. “What’s the fiber count in that?”

“Uhh,” Peridot says eloquently, glancing down at her hands holding ingredients for a breakfast smoothie like their actions are entirely independent of her. She blinks rapidly. “I — uh, I don’t —“

“Never mind, I’ll make something up,” Little T sighs, marking their diet sheets and sticking them back on the fridge. The dog-eared pages are held in place by a magnet from the Donor Program, which must have been a handout from some long-ago event — a familiar symbol, four smaller pastel diamonds inside the larger one. It had been a part of Lapis’s Hailsham uniform her whole life, unquestioned.

Little T looks up and sweeps her mismatched haircut back behind her shoulder, and her eyes land on Lapis.

Her mouth pulls. “How far did you get this time?”

“… the fence,” Lapis admits, bitterly.

The responding laugh isn’t unkind, exactly, but Lapis is still too raw — bruised gross and green — to not take it personal.

“Told you,” Little T sweeps past Jasper. “Didn’t I? I said as soon as the door shuts behind that carer, little Blue’s gonna hike it in the opposite direction.”

Jasper’s reply is lost in a racket as the blender activates, but Little T laughs again and claps her on the shoulder as she leaves the kitchen. A moment later, Jasper and Peridot switch places — Peridot sliding in at Lapis’s elbow, Jasper plucking her diet sheet free of its magnet and scowling at the blender, which Peridot hadn’t bothered to rinse out. Remnants of berry-colored goop slides steadily down the interior.

Peridot thins her eyes at her back.

“Is she, like, _following_ you everywhere now?” she whispers, cupping her hand around her mouth to keep her voice between herself and Lapis.

Lapis shakes her off.

“No,” she answers, mild. “I invited her.”

Peridot’s nostrils flare, but Lapis feels a keen stinging inside her chest: she wants to punish her, too, for staying behind when Lapis made a break for the sea.

(She didn’t stop to change _shoes,_ but she did stop for Peridot, crowding into the phone booth outside the filling station and dialing back to the Cottages, breathless, heart pounding enormous and scared inside her chest. She was the only thing she wanted to bring.)

(Peridot, however, hadn’t been willing to throw away everything she’d ever known, and it’ll be years yet before the scab picks off and Lapis can see underneath; that it was the unstable future Peridot was saying no to, the haste for that single hazy rumor of a boat, not _Lapis._ But at the time, it was unfathomable, that she should say, _Peridot,_ and _freedom,_ and that Peridot would reply with, _Lapis, I think you should just come back.)_

So she says, “You started it,” and she is so starved for satisfaction, lean and mean and hungry with it, that it’s worth it — the way Peridot’s mouth flinches.

 

*

 

The internal politics of the cottage shift around as Jasper squeezes herself into their friend circle — “how can it be a circle if it’s just the two of us,” Peridot remarks, droll, “shouldn’t it just be a straight line?” — and since Lapis’s house arrest isn’t technically up until Sapphire can submit her review back to the Authority, she wastes a lot of time observing the others.

Granted, she’d had all winter to do that, but adjustment had happened slowly. Life at the Cottages is very different than how it had been at Hailsham.

Even the _act_ of adjusting was new to Lapis. There’d never been much to adjust _to_ at Hailsham — getting your Affiliation was probably the biggest upset to the order of their lives that any of them had faced. Sure, it’s exciting to be somewhere new, but it’s exhausting too, all the little things she suddenly had to think about — where her shoes go and where to put her cereal bowl when she’s done with it and which way to twist the shower knob for hot water (answer: in the opposite direction you think you should. You twist _towards_ the C because you want there to be _more_ H than C. Apparently. Lapis shouts through gritted teeth for three showers before she figures it out.)

“Lapis?” Carnelian stops at the foot of the sofa. She’s got a brown box in her arms, the tape feathered open. “Do you want to help me do product reviews?”

On her back on the sofa cushions, Lapis drags her eyes away from the patch of light she’d been watching.

“What is it?”

Carnelian fishes a plastic bag out. Through it, Lapis can make out something textured, orange, and felt.

“Oh! That's interesting.” Everything Carnelian says comes out like bubbles rising, an audible ascent that always bursts at the end. Her laughter, especially — it almost _tinkles,_ like the tags on Big T’s terriers when they go racing up the stairs. She’s as fizzy, sweet, and difficult to consume as a carbonated beverage, and Lapis feels her mouth crimping with annoyance even before Carnelian says, “They’re hats! With the long ear flaps that are also pockets. I think it’s supposed to be cute. Wonder if we’ll get to keep them?”

“Are they new?”

“Oh,” _pop!_ “Well, no.”

“Then yes, we’ll get to keep them.”

“Good point,” Carnelian allows, shifting her grip on the box. Then, “I’m sure we’ll get something better next life, but — it’s work, Lapis. Like a job. You get paid money for it and everything!”

Lapis laces her fingers over her stomach. “I am working.”

A beat of silence passes, politely dubious.

“I am taking care of my internal organs and keeping them from harm,” Lapis tells her sanctimoniously.

“Oh, Lapis.” Her smile turns wry, dimpling one cheek. Carnelian’s skin is the same color as her hair and her eyes, red-brown and warm. “Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be in the computer room.”

“You’ll have to fight Peridot for it!” Lapis calls after her retreating back, and a moment later, a loud, “ _OW! Carnelian!”_ sounds out from down the hall.

Not long later, Peridot comes slinking out, rubbing the back of her head and dropping onto the cushion by Lapis’s knees. “White affiliates are the _worst,”_ she mutters. “They always have to be right.”

“And you don’t?”

Peridot sniffs, drawing herself up and putting a hand over her heart. “I don’t _need_ to be right, Lapis — I just usually am.”

Winter this far south is shorter than it had been up at Hailsham, but the last snows of Ventis come wet and heavy, blanketing the roofs of the Cottages and sweeping up against the fence, turning the scrubby fields into an unbroken ocean of white. At sunset, the whole scene turns as soft and pink as cotton candy, but in daylight, it’s blindingly bright, and the delivery driver curses and tries fruitlessly to clean his windshield so that he can see through the glare, truck bouncing over the humps in the long dirt drive that connects the Cottages to the main road, sending slush everywhere.

He unloads in the middle of the quad, heedless of the little shoveled patch they left for him. 

Lapis sits on the back porch with her legs dangling through the railing, watching, trying not to feel like she is once again on the wrong side of a mirror.

Her experience with humans is limited exclusively to the Caretakers, and the doctors and nurses who performed their frequent physical evaluations. She has no practical experience with which to judge whether this man is old, or just weathered. Does he squint because he’s angry, or has bad glasses like Peridot, or is he stuck like that from years of driving in the sun?

She doesn’t realize she’s muttering, “look at me, _look at me,”_ until a boot scrapes against the salted steps.

“I _am_ looking at you,” Jasper says.

“You don’t —“ Lapis starts, annoyed, but the wind goes out of her sails and she finishes without momentum, “— count.”

Jasper continues up the porch, and Lapis thinks she’s going inside — but instead, she comes around and leans against the railing next to her. She’s all ill-fitting men’s jeans and orange windbreaker and hair she doesn’t take very good care of, mats forming at the nape of her neck, the ends ratty. Lapis wrinkles her nose, leaning away.

“What’s wrong?” Jasper asks her, but in that way that makes her sound more exasperated than concerned.

Lapis clenches her jaw.

“We’re going to save their lives,” she says, jerking her chin as the driver scans another tote with his handheld, then drops it in the snow with the rest. “You’d think they’d … I don’t know, _acknowledge_ us or something, but it’s like they don’t even want to look at us. And _I_ haven’t been to town yet,” she says pointedly, but Jasper just gives her a flat look, like _whose fault is that?_ “But Big T says it’s the same there. Why?”

Shoving her hair back, Jasper contemplates the scene.

“I could _make_ him,” she offers, and rolls her shoulders. “Like say ‘thank you’ or something.”

“Ugh, don’t be gross,” Lapis responds, but it drives her to her feet.

She brushes at the damp patches the snow left on her skirt, and then turns, staring at a point past Jasper’s shoulder.

“Don't you hate this?” comes out of her, soft. “You do, you hate them, I know you do. You hate that you’ll have to donate to them.”

“Maybe,” Jasper agrees. “But it’s all I’ve known. It’s all I know how to do.”

“It’s all _I_ know, too, but that doesn’t mean I _have_ to do it. I want to find another way to live.”

“I can’t let you do that,” Jasper says simply. She’d submitted her application to the guardian’s guild even before they’d finished sorting out whose shoes went in what cubby. “You have to stay here.”

Lapis knots her shoulders up by her ears, knuckles coming up white. That makes her sound like a _prisoner._

“Then I’m going to find a better life, _and_ I’ll jailbreak to do it.”

“Spare me,” Jasper mutters.

She goes to push herself off the railing, then startles when Lapis abruptly closes, coming up onto the balls of her feet.

“And _you,”_ she says, right into Jasper’s face. “Are just going to have to keep a _very_ close watch on me, because when I bolt, everyone’s gonna know it’s because you couldn’t keep me. And do you think they’ll let you be a guardian then?”

 

*

 

On one hand, having Jasper suddenly shackled to her at the hip means a marked improvement in Jasper’s personal hygiene, since Lapis’s skin crawls just being within _spitting_ distance of that mess, but on the other hand, Citrine develops a habit of muttering, “ugh, you don’t have to be all crystal about it,” whenever they do anything together, regardless of whether it’s crystal or not.

In the meantime, she takes mean satisfaction in imagining her grip on Jasper tightening until it comes up plum-colored. 

_Serves her right,_ she thinks, and swipes her wrist at the chip reader one more time.

 

*

 

Color bleeds slowly back into the sky as the month of Ventis flips over into Floris. With that flourishing shade of blue as witness, Peridot, Lapis, and Jasper walk through the spring mush to the bus stop, where they catch a ride to the library.

 

*

 

The door swings open at Jasper’s tug, and as they pass under her arm, Lapis is hit in the face with a blush of central heating and an unfamiliar smell that she’ll forever identify simply as “library,” something that turns out to be pages, musty and aging and utterly incomparable to anything else she’s smelled before. On the next step, she registers the people.

Peridot’s fingers turn into a vice-grip around her bicep, which Lapis might have been understanding of if her nails weren’t digging in hard enough to make another set of rotten-fruit bruises. She’d only _just_ gotten rid of the last ones.

She hisses, but there’s no point. Peridot’s oblivious, her eyes darting around frantically, throat bobbing.

“I’ve forgotten all my scripts,” she confesses in a terrified whisper. 

Jasper’s no use, either, keeping glued to their backs and moving restlessly, trying to glare at everyone at once. It’s a small building, not unlike the Cottages in that it sticks to the ground like a burr in a bush, lumpy and old. She counts five other people — _real_ people, _human_ people, people who are not Caretakers or doctors or nurses but _people_ — in and amongst the shelves. Two children are being read to in a corner that has a soft carpet and several colorful posters, interrupting their storyteller with noisy enthusiasm, and only just now does Lapis realize she’s _missed_ children’s voices.

But she’s on a mission, and directly ahead of them is a desk with a sign above it that says Information.

She shakes the other two off, stalks straight forward to that desk, and says, “I want all your books that will teach me to drive a boat,” in the loudest, clearest voice she can, because the Caretakers always told them to _enunciate_ during scripts, which Lapis is pretty sure means that humans can’t be very smart.

Then she remembers that you can’t drive a boat.

“Sail,” she corrects. “Sail. A boat.”

Somewhere behind her, Peridot makes a trod-upon noise.

With glacial slowness, the librarian’s eyes slide upward from the stack of books she’d steadily been scanning her way through. Lapis is pretty sure that’s what she is — in scripts, they always gave the librarian bifocals with a bedazzled chain, which Lapis assumed meant _all_ librarians had to wear them in order to be considered a librarian, but maybe that’s not true.

The maybe-librarian leans forward, and points. “Against that back wall there.”

Lapis follows the direction of her finger, and sees nothing but books.

“Among local history and special interests,” she elaborates, after a pause.

“Right,” says Lapis helplessly. And, “okay,” and “thank you.”

Thirty minutes later, she catches herself trying to write three things at once, and stops, leaning back. She looks at the books in front of her, then at the ones she hasn’t even cracked open yet, and says in wonderment, “Why didn’t I do this before?”

Across from her, eyeballing her pile with deep mistrust, Jasper’s brows knit.

“Homeworld didn’t have a library?”

“No, we did, it was just —“

Lapis had never bothered. It was more Peridot’s domain, and if there was something she needed to see, usually it was Peridot pointing it out to her. (Peridot herself is currently at one of the computers, where there’s no Carnelian to run her off — you have to use your library card in order to swipe in and access it, and it will be a few visits yet before they learn that there’s a restriction on what information donors have access to that regular library visitors don’t.)

She glances down at her notes, her drawings with their inexpert, watery lines, and her mouth moves soundlessly over the vocabulary words.

Then she looks up, and shows teeth.

“After this, we’re continuing into town and we’re going to look at the real thing.”

Jasper’s jaw sets. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

“You can’t stop us.”

“I will drag the _both_ of you back by the hair before that happens.”

If Carnelian’s voice is all carbonation and bubbles, then Jasper’s is more like a sudden murder, dragged low across gravel. It’s something you bury out of sight before you trip over it.

But this is the pattern that emerges. Lapis keeps bringing them back, brazenly looking at maps of the local ocean currents, the shoals and the lunar tides, the islets out at sea, taking notes that she squirrels away among her treasures back at the cottage, but Jasper puts her foot down whenever she presses for any practical application.

“That was not our mission,” she says, every time. 

Peridot groans. “Do you even _listen_ to yourself?” she demands, but Jasper just does that thing where she pretends she’s too tall for Peridot’s voice to reach her.

“It’s okay. We’ve got stools at home — you can get up there and yell at her,” Lapis offers.

Peridot transfers her glare to her. “You’re not helping!”

 

*

 

They do go into town eventually, once they manage to stop jumping every time a stranger comes within touching distance.

Every second is alarming. Lapis feels like she walked right out of her life into a TV show — _her_ life doesn’t involve this many people, this much traffic, or _shops_ or filling stations or schoolchildren who aren’t in uniform — and what happens to her in town can’t be _real._ On the bus, Lapis hears some kind of caretaker tell a small child that he can _look_ at the sea, but he can’t go swimming, and it simply doesn’t connect in Lapis’s brain, the idea that a beach is a place that she can go. Beaches belong on shows, not in a donor’s life.

Each trip remains incident-free, until they try the cafe.

After, when Lapis’s increasing volume escalates the situation from an “incident” into a “scene,” Jasper cuts it short by hooking an arm around her waist, lifting her clean off her feet, and hauling her outside.

“How — _fucking_ — get off, get off, let _go_ of me!” Lapis pants, craning her body back and shoving at every part of Jasper she can reach.

Jasper drops her on the pavement, heels hitting hard enough to rattle her teeth.

Stiff and iced over with rage, Lapis swings around and levels her with her most reptilian look.

She hisses, “You — you think you can just _drag_ me wherever you want?”

“Don't think,” Jasper sneers. “Did.”

They square off. It’s the middle of the sidewalk in the middle of the day, and traffic moves by in every direction: cars in the road, pedestrians on foot, birds in the sky, all of it overstimulating, overwhelming, and she wants it all to _stop._ The soles of her sneakers are thin enough that she can feel the edge of the paving stone with the flat of her foot. The seabound southerlies keep dragging Jasper’s hair into her eyes and across her mouth — she paws them out of the way.

“Nobody is going to keep me here,” Lapis says flatly. “Least of all, you.”

She’s watching, unblinking, but a second’s warning is all she gets before Jasper strikes.

“Oh, so, what,” her lips come off her teeth, taunting. “You think you’re the next Rose Quartz?”

And they both freeze.

Right then, the name is barely anything more to them than rumor, the kind of gossip you pick up the same way you’d pick up a shiny rock even knowing it’s probably just a pebble — the template for Rose Quartzes had been retired, everyone knows that. Not just refitted, the way they did to the Pearls, but straight up chucked into a bin.

The myth is that one Rose Quartz got away.

Escaped.

Broke her microchip and stole into the night with all her organs — a theft more valuable than artwork.

She was _the_ incident, the one Caretaker Rebecca mentioned that day, the one that changed things for all donors. A Director had been removed for it, and without her, kindergartens like Prime and Beta started falling into disrepair. They didn’t always farm children like chickens in a coop, and blame … blame could easily be traced back to Rose Quartz, because she put herself first.

Because she _succeeded._

Lapis lifts her chin. “So what if I am?”

Jasper’s eyes flash.

She smiles in a way that isn’t friendly at all and says, “Because if Rose Quartz hadn’t been so _selfish,_ she would have realized how _her_ actions would reflect on all donors! The Authority’s been punishing us, restricting us, for _years_ because they can’t get at _her!”_

Raking her hair back, she paces a tight circle on the pavement. Lapis opens her mouth to speak, but Jasper steamrolls right over her.

“— and it’ll be that way with you, too. Say you get away — congratulations! To prevent it from happening again, they’ll take it out on _every single person_ you leave behind.”

Lapis’s heart is an anvil strike inside her chest, pounding blood too big for the bones and skin that contain it. She can feel the throbbing of her pulse all the way to her _ears._

She tries to remember what Bismuth had said, inside the cafe.

 _— got a friend named Pearl — one of the older era Pearls, and you_ know _how rare those be these days, if you catch my drift — and she says our jobs aren’t any different from that show all you Cottage kids like. What's it called? Right - Lil Butler._

_We don’t own anything. Our bodies aren’t even ours._

_All we’re doing is holding their stuff for them._

Anger sparks her into movement again, like a wind-up toy finding one last rotation in its cogs, and she flings her arms wide.

“So what! We shouldn’t even try? We shouldn’t even _fight?_ Rose Quartz believed all life was valuable — even _ours!”_

“Our lives _are_ valuable!” Jasper fires back.“You can ask any Caretaker or carer — they’ll probably give you the exact dollar amount!”

Lapis yells at her; a furious, wordless bark of a sound.

The surge of emotion goes every which way in her body, her stomach tossing and her heart dropping, and she’s reminded of the advice she gave Peridot, years ago at Hailsham, about how if someone’s got you so mad all you can think about is hurting them, then you need to step back and start laughing. Even if you don’t feel like laughing, you’ve got to, just to show them how much they don’t _matter._

She fails to take her own advice.

“ _Why_ are you like this!” comes roaring out of her. “It’s like you _want_ us shuttled off, to be — _harvested_ and disposed of! You want us to die without ever putting up a fight? That’s why we _have_ to fight!”

“All I _do_ is fight! All Peridot does is _fight —_ ”

“You leave her out of this!”

“Yeah, leave me out of this,” pipes in from the sidelines. She’s sitting on top of the guard rail that keeps cars from popping onto the sidewalk, where neither of them are paying her the slightest bit of attention.

“— of us, in our own ways, are _fighting,_ but Lapis, you’re too absorbed in your own drama to notice!”

They stop, panting, and glare at each other.

Peridot shifts, like she’s ready to hop down and say something to the effect of _are you done? Cool, let’s go!_

Except they’re not done.

“All I want,” Jasper says; low, brutal. “Is to protect us. I don’t want there to be a single mystery about how we die. I don’t want anyone to be frightened the way my kindergartners were frightened.”

“You think I _don’t_ want that?” Lapis returns; quick, vicious. “I just don’t want our deaths to be so inevitable that they cloud every moment we could be _free.”_

 

*

 

There’d been a perimeter fence that ran the entire length of the Hailsham compound, from the former filling station to the office buildings and around the picnic area in the back. It was electrified, and sometimes from the classrooms you could see a guardian cleaning up the birds and small mammals that ran into it on accident. At the Cottages during Callunis, when it’s warmer, Lapis will sleep with her windows open so that she can hear the hum of the generator in its shed, and pretend it’s just the fence and that nothing has changed.

No child, for any reason, _ever_ set foot beyond that fence until the day they left.

If anybody had ever tried to outsmart it and escape, they failed so miserably that there wasn’t even a story to tell about it, because Lapis never heard any. You just didn’t leave.

At the Cottages, there isn’t anything like that. 

No electric fence, no chained link, no barbed wire, no guardian beyond whoever hasn’t fallen asleep in front of the TV — just some measly chicken wire that separates the girls’ cottages from the boys’, the fields, and the cliffs where the rock meets ocean and sky.

The fence just isn't necessary. Sure as ball and chain, their own habits sink them like an anchor thrown to sea. It keeps them doing their diet and exercise sheets. It keeps them checking in every evening, even Lapis, swiping their wrist at the chip reader until it beeps. _Donor Registered._ It keeps them from running away, because they’ve never done it before, so why start now?

Somebody told her once that — that regular people, the ones on the outside who don’t have anything to do with donors or the Authority or any of it, they’re always questioning why are there even kindergartens at all. Why bother educating children who are too temporary to contribute that education back?

But Lapis knows why.

It’s for this — 

In this, teaching them to make their own chains and lock themselves up, the kindergartens did their job perfectly.

 

*

 

Whereas Lapis’s world folds inward like an inexpert attempt at origami while she's on house arrest, Peridot expands at the Cottages, and despite what she’d planned at Hailsham, she decides early on to be a carer.

“Good,” says Lapis. “That means you’ll get a car, and you can drive us to the sea.”

“I think I’ll be too busy for that,” Peridot responds primly, but in that way where they both know she doesn’t mean it.

As the snows melt away and the flowers come up, and as they in turn crack and dry into grasses that sigh and fan themselves in the high summer wind, Lapis notices a difference start to emerge between Peridot her friend and Peridot the carer-in-training. 

A carer’s job is to keep their assigned donors physically and psychologically healthy during the span of their donations. As a practice, the Authority implemented it shortly after preliminary tests showed them that donors had an alarming tendency to lay down and give up as it finally dawned on them that this was their purpose, that there was no recovery — not ever, not really. Carers were picked from the donor’s own peers, because who else are you going to trust after a lifetime spent in isolation?

When the four of them first rotated in, the older residents had initially pegged Carnelian to be the one to go for carer training.

“Oh, no,” she bubbles at them when they bring this up around the TV one night. “But next go around, maybe, I’d like to be a person who does good things for people — perhaps I could drive a schoolbus? But I’m not strong enough to be a carer, no.”

It goes to show how little even Amber or Big T — whose first donations are coming up rapidly — have thought about the process, if they think relentless good cheer like the kind Carnelian has in spades is all you need to be a good carer. You need an iron stomach.

Peridot manages it with a detached matter-of-factness and acerbic realism.

 _This is happening to you,_ she says, _and it will happen to me and there’s nothing you can do about it, but I’ll stay here and answer every question you have._

It’s the scaly remnant of the pigeon-toed girl who used to sneak into the shower stall simply to read her books, and nothing at all like the ridiculous person she becomes in private, prone to howling at Lapis’s fart jokes and wanting to try _everything,_ including tabasco sauce on pickles and training Big T’s terriers to do something embarrassing or going into a cafe and, like, ordering a _latte_ and _talking_ to _people,_ and what a disaster _that_ turned out to be, the three of them sitting petrified on one side of a booth and fumbling all their scripts as the barista grew more and more annoyed until finally the Bismuth in the corner intervened.

It probably has something to do with the TV shows — they’re like the scripts they had at Hailsham, but with actors, and it’s just more material that Peridot thinks she has to try to mimic in order to say she’s alive.

It’s strange, that Lapis can turn around and find herself looking at a Peridot she’s never been before; the one out back by the sawhorse with Fluorite trying to make sense of a rolled-out blueprint, or the one willingly letting one of the terriers lick her chin even though they _all_ saw that same dog lick its butt earlier that day.

The jealousy that stabs through her in those moments makes no sense, but neither does it make sense that there could be a facet of her best friend that’s unknown to her.

No, she supposes — 

It’s more that it makes you feel small, like no matter how big they are in your life, you’re only a small part of theirs, and _that’s_ what she’s jealous of.

They’re Homeworld, both of them. No one else can know them the way _they_ know them.

(When Citrine says it, or Little T when she’s calling for help hauling in totes from the quad, or Carnelian in her thoughtlessly generous way, they include Jasper under that umbrella, like her connection to Lapis and Peridot makes her Homeworld by default, and it will be years before it occurs to Lapis just how _much_ Jasper resented that.)

“You’re going to be my carer, right?” she asks.

“Uh, duh,” says Peridot. Then, “Hey, do you think if I hooked up five toilets to each other, we could make a fountain out of them? Like the Falls, but funnier, because they’re _toilets!”_

 

*

 

(She’s cross-legged on the quilt in her room, turning over that old tape recorder in her hands. Her quilt is a different shape and chunkier than Lapis’s, but it’s worn just the same, and she’s stuck her walls with all the packing slips from the boxes they get sent for product reviews — all this stuff that comes to them from places they will never go. 

“I just wanted to share everything with you,” she confesses. “The things I think are neat and cool and worth living for.”

And Lapis says, quiet, “What do you think I was trying to do when I called you and asked you to go? But you — _you_ sent Jasper after me.”)

 

*

 

They take Big T first.

It’s a woman, someone in Dorova on the list for a kidney transplant, and turning twenty-one puts Big T on the map as the closest available match, so the summons comes through as Amber’s smearing a cake pan with butter — the chip reader blaring, the screen expanding, Citrine caught hunting for candles and Peridot licking a beater. The cake sits heavy in everyone’s stomachs, after.

Of course, the worst part isn’t going to be when she says good-bye, it’s going to be when her dogs realize that she’s leaving.

“I can’t,” she says flatly. “I can’t do it. You’re going to have to take them away, please.”

The terriers get anxious the whole week leading up to her departure, knowing something’s up: Big T’s decorations coming down, her clothes going into the upcycle bin, her quilt folded and left at the foot of her bed for the next occupant. Shortly before the car is due, Jasper whistles and takes them far out into the fields. She’s never been good at good-byes, either, but she’s got a strong throwing arm that will keep the terriers busy for hours, so she volunteers.

“Buck up,” says the carer, an Azurite with bad teeth and an oversized cardigan. “We’re saving lives here! Our contribution is vital.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Big T, forlorn, stretching up to Little T for a hug.

Little T hugs her back, saying, “thanks for everything, babe,” and Big T hides her expression against the shaved side of her scalp.

Lapis remains outside after she’s gone, the car pulled away and turned onto the main road, a TV blaring something with a nonsensical laugh track from one of the other cottages, until Jasper returns, preceded by fluffy bobbing tails.

They keep the dogs distracted until after dinner, which is when they start nosing around Big T’s closed bedroom door, whining.

After about ten minutes of this, Amber stomps her heel into the floor hard enough to make the furniture jump and bellows, “ _SHUT UP,”_ and the dogs’ nails skitter on the hardwood as they dive for cover. Lapis almost ducks, too, and opens her mouth to say something about it, but there’s a glassine quality to Amber’s face that stops her — Amber hasn’t gotten her notice yet, but she’s been twenty-one for a month and it’s only a matter of time.

Later, she watches Peridot tuck the terriers away for the night and wonders.

Once enough time has passed, will there be anybody who remembers Big T at all? Will these dogs just become cottage dogs, devoid of any connection to the Tourmaline that raised them?

“Don’t do that,” she mutters to herself, because the same is true for any of them.

They washed up here and they’ll leave their detritus behind, same as the rest. Who’s going to remember that for a year, everyone got rid of their dark chocolate by giving it to Little T and Jasper — even people from the other cottages? Who’s going to know that the cans of preserved oranges had their labels ripped off because Citrine got tired of the joke? Who’s going to know who painted the giant pink rose in the laundry shed?

(Actually, Lapis has no idea who did that. It wasn’t anybody she knows.)

Is Little T going to stop being Little T now that there’s no Big T to compare her to? 

Or will another Tourmaline arrive — someone with the same face, but who’s cut differently or assigned a different Affiliation?

“The Donor Program was an excellent way to test the limits of cloning —” Peridot tells them, full lecture mode. “How to exaggerate certain features or characteristics. No two clones are exactly alike, which — yes, I know, ironic, right?”

“Make ‘em big, turn ‘em Pink,” agrees Fluorite from the other side of the kitchen table.

“Make them runty, call them Blue,” Jasper snaps back at her.

Fluorite’s eyebrows hike.

Warily, Lapis draws her glass of milk and Oreos closer to her on the tabletop, in case anybody thinks about throwing anything. She’d been here _first,_ thank you, and then Peridot went to find Jasper with a broken appliance and said, _fix this,_ and now there’s a whole mess in her space.

There hadn’t been any other Lapis Lazuli at Hailsham, but there’d been another Peridot, who had been eight years old at the time of their graduation and clearly heading for a White affiliation. Once her Peridot’s initial curiosity wore off, Lapis rarely paid attention to the littler one, but it’d been strange seeing all of Peridot’s facial tics in miniature, just like it was always momentarily discombobulating when Big T and Little T stood side-by-side — Big T’s face the compact, thrifty version of Little T’s, which was as big and broad and Pink as her.

“Some of it has to be predetermined, then,” Peridot ventures, her voice thoughtful. “But they don’t give you an Affiliation until you’re eleven, in case you decide to go rogue.”

And those make the four diamonds of the Diamond Authority:

Pink for strength and robust health, Yellow for ingenuity and experimentation, Blue for docility, and White for leadership potential.

Like Lapis, Fluorite is Blue affiliated, and at first didn't display any more personality than wet wallpaper would, willing to sit through one of Peridot’s tirades just as much as she was willing to sit in silence with a dour Lapis for hours. She tolerates Jasper’s clumsy attempts at appliance repair (Lapis doesn’t know where they picked up the script for this, but they all go to the biggest girl in the cottage when something breaks or needs elbow grease, and Jasper’s got a good mind for wrestlings things apart, but too bad a temper for putting it back together again) for about five minutes, and then snaps.

She says, quieter than the start of a violin solo, all poise and petulance, “oh, give that here.”

Which is how Lapis learns that Fluorite is one of maybe two humans on the planet who can look at the contents of a toolbox without panicking.

Not only that, she can _make_ stuff — she builds a doghouse for Big T’s terriers now that they can’t sleep on her bed, and gleefully helps Peridot with a rudimentary Rube Goldberg machine. It’s not much fancier than a ball on a wire track, and you’ve got to do most of the prep work the night before, but it can start a pot of coffee without anyone having to leave the warm confines of their quilt and brave the creaking steps.

Everyone agrees that Fluorite’s brain is wasted on being a donor, but it’s not their brains they’re being harvested for.

“Um. That’s a pretty awful thing to call it,” says Carnelian.

She’s standing by the front door, watching as Peridot sends Jasper up on a ladder to fix a rend in the track that stops the ball cold if it doesn’t build enough momentum.

“What is?” Peridot says absently.

“Harvesting.”

Peridot exchanges a look with Jasper, and then with Lapis.

“What would you rather we call it?” she wants to know, leaning out to better drip sarcasm. “Manufactured so we can _make donations?”_

“We _are_ donors,” Carnelian tries, with the resignation of someone who thinks they have a good point, but is going to let you win just so it doesn’t escalate. She’s so relentlessly good-natured that Lapis, Peridot, and Jasper’s kneejerk reaction almost every time she opens her mouth is a heartfelt _“ugh”,_ even though there’s really no good reason for it.

“We’ve been cloned and cooked specifically for that purpose,” Peridot volleys back. “And it’s called harvesting.”

“Peridot —“ Jasper starts.

Peridot and Lapis both make loud, rude noises, because _wow_ — if she’s arguing, that’s _super rich,_ coming from her.

“— I was just going to ask you to try it now,” Jasper says, aggravated.

Peridot ignores her.

Slamming her fist into the palm of her other hand, she says, “And! _And_ the Authority is probably patting itself on the back for it, because all of this — the Donor Program, even the — the advances in cloning, all of it is technically ethical! Nobody is being taken advantage of, not if the organs you’re harvesting come from test subjects have been _made_ for it! Win win for everyone.”

And Lapis hears:

_They’re never going to shut it down, or let us live._

Carnelian’s shoulders hunch, but like bubbles rising to the top of a glass, she straightens up again. She believes that bones and bodies and blood are nothing but a hostel, a temporary place to rest before they move on — she has a habit of saying “next time, I’ll try that,” like the real thing’s just around the corner. Nothing sticks to her for long.

“That’s a win for everyone, except,” she says, “for us.”

“Give the girl a star,” drawls Lapis.

 

*

 

**Strawberry Fields Recovery Center, Delmarva**  
**Year 23, Diamond Standard**

 

Carnelian completes on her first donation.

 

*

 

Jasper’s probationary status means her movement is restricted between wards, and the same six beds get very boring, _very_ quickly, no matter how cavalier Eyeball is about nudity.

So when a Zinc offers a chance to smuggle her into a downstairs ward, she pounces on it.

(“Smuggle her in” turns out to be just be, “well … what if you … _didn’t_ swipe your wrist at the chip reader on your way in?” and Jasper blinks at him, then blinks at the chip reader on the wall by his shoulder, then blinks at her wrist with a dawning sense that her entire life could have gone in a different direction if this had occurred to her, say, five years ago. She knows Lapis spent ages dwelling on how she was going to neutralize her microchip, but she’s pretty sure she never tried just … dodging check-in. You swiped when you entered a space and you swiped when you left. That's as natural as putting on shoes.)

The walls in Zinc’s ward are orange, compared to the mint green in hers, and he’s got three large tattoos running down his face in that near exact color. She suspects he thinks it makes him look formidable, but mostly it just makes him look like he should be warning her about road construction. He’s one of those people that all you have to do is say “oh, really? Tell me more,” and then sit back and nap for thirty minutes, so that’s exactly what she does.

She rouses herself at one point to ask, “New donor?” as a nurse deftly starts turning down the unoccupied bed in the corner.

“Must be,” says Zinc. “Emergency transplant, probably, because I didn’t hear anything about a newbie.”

 _How can you?_ Jasper thinks. _You’re too busy talking._

Hours later, the nurse comes back in and strips the bed down unused, which can only mean one thing.

“Hey,” Jasper interrupts, and jerks her chin.

Zinc stops picking at his IV tape, eyebrows coming down, and she watches him process the implications. Resentment makes a brief, incandescent portrait out of his face — a type of resentment Jasper has only ever seen on donors — before he puts on his usual mask of studied disinterest.

“Boo, bad form,” he says.

“ _Weak,”_ Jasper agrees, uncharitably.

Later, as he’s swiping her back out again, she catches a glimpse of the screen mounted in the hallway. For the convenience of the nurses and carers, it shows the faces of each donor housed inside the ward. She sees Zinc’s tattooed face, and then right underneath it —

She halts abruptly.

“Oh,” says Zinc, coming around Jasper’s bulk to see. “That must have been her.” He tilts his head, studying the mug shot. “Funny, how sometimes you can just look at a person and think, yeah, they’ll kick it early. They won’t put up a fight.”

A long moment passes.

He frowns at her sidelong. “You don’t look so great.”

“I knew her,” says Jasper flatly. “She had the bedroom next to mine at the Cottages. She _sang_ when she did the dishes, Zinc.”

“Oh, that sucks,” he says, and she can’t tell if he means Carnelian’s singing or — or —

Her death. She’s _dead._

“Are you … gonna be okay?”

Like a cold slap of water to her face, this wakes her up.

She shakes herself off briskly, throws him a quelling look. Of course she is. She’s a Jasper. She’s Pink affiliated. She’s never been anything _but_ okay.

“Yeah,” she says, hard. “Donating is like any other job. Some people are good at it, some people aren’t.”

“Except … when we’re bad at donating, we die.”

“Like I said.”

“Harsh,” he comments.

She shrugs. “Just being honest,” she says, and then hates herself.

For the next two days, her mind keeps fiddling with it like it’s a wrapper in her pocket that her fingers can’t leave alone; it’s noon now, would Carnelian’s corpse have been incinerated with the rest of the waste already? Is she entirely gone, not a shred of her left beyond whatever working part is now in someone else’s body? Did they harvest _all_ of her organs or just the vital ones, once they realized she couldn’t be salvaged?

Around and around these thoughts go.

And then a carer comes looking for her.

She whirls in during an otherwise quiet time in Jasper’s ward, preceded by the box in her arms and the hard click of her heels on the linoleum. Her presence fills the space, stirring the other residents like debris lifted with the ripples in a pond, and she takes them all in. 

Her eyes land on Jasper. Every feature on her face springs apart in surprise.

Jasper reacts similarly.

“ _Oh.”_

It’s one thing to know, like, _academically_ that there are other Jaspers, and another thing entirely to see one up close. They’re practically the same age, they have to be. This could even be the Jasper they cooked up right before they did her. 

That's almost like being sisters, right?

She wrestles herself upright, greedily taking in every detail; they’ve got the same dark skin, the same lightning-bolt hair with the auburn burnt into it, although where Jasper keeps hers long like a bear pelt, this Jasper has hers in tiny, economic knots around her scalp. Her mouth and nose aren’t quite so broad, and when she turns Jasper sees she’s got on a pair of emerald pumps, the same color as the suede coat that swings around her knees. Jealousy stabs her somewhere soft — there were never any heels big enough to fit her at the Cottages.

Approaching her cot, Jasper-in-Heels says brusquely, “Hello. I am — was the carer for Carnelian 12.0, cut M45gm.”

Jasper’s breath hitches.

“This was among her things, but it says here that it belongs to you.” The brown shipping box has feathered tape, and it could be any one of the boxes Carnelian got during their time at the Cottages, containing all of those sample products she was paid to review on shopping sites. Jasper-in-Heels flips open a flap and goes digging as she comes around to Jasper’s bedside.

The next moment, something unspools into the palm of Jasper's outstretched hand.

Like getting hit, it drives another punched breath out of her. She turns the pendant over with her thumb. The stone set in it is dark blue, flecked with bright spots like sugar.

Lapis lazuli. From the catalogue.

“I don’t believe it,” she mutters, but that’s a lie. Of course she can believe it: Carnelian worked diligently all four years she was at the Cottages, and _this_ is what she chose to spend that money on?

And maybe she gifted the others with their own namesakes — if Jasper recalls correctly, there _had_ been jasper available, a strange reddish sandswept stone — but Carnelian must have known, or at least guessed … 

“Fuck,” she says, and then again, softer and with more feeling, “ _Fuck.”_

During this, Jasper-in-Heels had been looking carefully over her shoulder, allowing her to process her inheritance in private, but now she speaks.

“You’re an artist?”

Jasper looks up, then back at the projects she’d lined up under the window. “I —“

Catching the look on her face, the other Jasper smiles quickly, shaking her head. “That’s not a bad thing, I was just … it’s funny how that happens. It must be unique to you, and not our genes. I can’t even draw in a straight line.”

“Well, I’m not very good, _obviously,”_ Jasper rolls her eyes. “But it’s … something.” A beat, and without meaning to, she asks, “Do you like them?”

Jasper-in-Heels considers it.

“They’re awful,” she says honestly, and this time her smile hooks her mouth like a sickle. “Too violent. I don't want to look at them. But that’s probably the point, don’t you think?”

After she leaves, Jasper remains where she is for a long time, turning over the lapis lazuli pendant in her hand. Her breath comes shorter and shorter. She’s too fresh from minor surgery to get up, to throw something, to do _anything_ to express the feeling inside of her — like she’s melting down, molten and terrible, because Carnelian was _kind,_ and she had been so _bright_ in a way that gave everyone else permission to be a little dark, a little ugly, or whatever they needed to be for five, ten minutes. There was always going to be Carnelian, unflaggingly good.

And now she’s dead.

Some people are good at their jobs. Some people are not.

 _Escape,_ whispers against the shell of her ear. _She saw the crack in the door and she dove for it. She was never your ally._

_She was always mine._

“Shut _up,”_ Jasper says raggedly, and Lapis’s phantom voice laughs at her.

She drops the pendant on her bedside table and swings herself upright. Grabbing for her walker, she drags herself to the bathroom, where she proceeds to find a stack of toilet seat covers in a lower cabinet. With sharp, ferocious movements, she shreds them — teeth gritted, breath hissing, muscles bunching under her gown, until her eyes water up too badly to see what she’s doing, until Bloodstone pounds on the door and says, “What the fuck, Jasper! I’m missing half my guts and I want to take a shit, hurry up!”

 

*

 

(Her mistake, among many, was to assume that someone would defend her.

That Lapis could blink her doe eyes and say, “I have the proof, please take her away and lock her up,” as hot and swift as a cauterizing knife, and someone would immediately speak up and say, “Bullshit! Everything Jasper has ever done is to _protect_ us, like the soldiers from our shows!”

But no one did.

Six faces and two dogs stood behind Lapis and watched them take her.

And once Jasper stops being angry about that, she needs to think about _why._

What did she do wrong, that she was left with no friends, an early donation slot, and her reputation in tatters?)

 

*

 

It took three major fights to destroy them.

— or, Jasper supposes, since almost everything else in their lives is determined by a Three Strikes rule, she tries to apply the same logic to her relationship with Lapis: now that she has a definite “you’re OUT” moment, the minor fights (while seemingly major at the time) pale next to these three when Jasper recategorized them.

The first was that fight in the woods, before Lapis was anything more to her than some sullen Homeworld girl she lived with.

The second was that fight in the cafe. Although — not technically _in_ the cafe. Lapis when she was out of the cafe wanted to keep talking about what happened in the cafe, so that’s what it feels like, that they wouldn’t leave until Lapis had picked the bones of that interaction clean. _That’s what Rose Quartz wants for us! That’s what I want!_

The third was about Rose Quartz’s son.

Towards the end, their arguments got colder, darker, deeper, carving ravines out of them like that map of the ocean floor Lapis hung in her room, with all the deep-sea trenches labelled with X’s: here’s where they’d dumped it all, the punched-out battleships, the containers marked nuclear. Here’s where the evidence of our war is buried.

By the time they officially separated, it had already been done in everything but name — partly because a need to punish someone and an aversion to sleeping cold does not make for a lasting relationship, partly because they were turning twenty-one soon and would be separated regardless. They hadn't yet heard of any couple from the Cottages being sent to a recovery center _together,_ so there wasn’t much point in holding on.

The newcomers from the younger classes — and it’s funny, how Jasper at seventeen had felt so adult, striking out on her own, utterly confident that the guardians would accept her application, but now that she’s looking at seventeen-year-olds from the other side, she sees nothing but their spotty faces, their bravado, their questions: _how is a shallot different from an onion?_ and _what’s television?_ — always would get that same funny look whenever anyone told them Jasper and Lapis had once been Jasper-and-Lapis. It would have been less startling to slap them in the face with a fish than to tell them that once, at a late Aramis barbecue, Jasper twirled her around underneath a bower behind the boys’ cottages and eventually drew her up because Lapis always kissed like she had a vendetta (wow, hindsight,) entirely unaware that their location wasn’t as private as they thought until their audience burst into cheers and held up scorecards made from cheap condiments and paper plates.

“How did _that_ happen?” was a common question, after.

Judgment usually fell on Jasper. She’s bigger, meaner, and uglier than Lapis, and knew as soon as Lapis went to her tiptoes by the pier that she was going to shoulder the blame when they fell apart.

And even knowing this, it _still_ caught her by surprise:

How as they were coming to arrest her, Lapis coldly, bloodlessly smiled up at her and said, “Next time, don’t drag a girl where she doesn’t want to go. Got it?”

Like all the intervening years had been nothing more than — 

— than a _trap._

And big, mean, ugly Jasper walked right into it; heart in her throat, heart in her hand.

 

*

 

“Pay up,” says the Ruby named Eyeball to the Ruby named Army. “I told you.”

“No way,” says Army, and budges up in order to make room. “You won. _Again?_ How did you do that?”

“I donated my uterus,” Jasper answers blandly, grabbing the bench back and using it to very gingerly lower herself into a sitting position. Her gut wails in pain; she grits her teeth and forces it down.

Army blinks, and takes a slow bite from her cup of ice cream. She got her nickname because a kitchen fire burned her cottage to the ground two years before her first donation. (It’s not like any of the fire codes are up to date in any of the places that were hastily appropriated for the Donor Program to use to hold their product for four years before they reached the new legal age of donation.) Her left arm is fused to her body from her elbow upward, neck pulled towards her shoulder, and she looks at everything from a lopsided angle. It doesn’t seem to slow her down, especially not where food is involved, but Jasper gets the feeling that’s an appearance she’s cultivated. Carefully.

“Really?” she says in surprise. Her eyes sweep Jasper head-to-toe.

Jasper smirks. “Got you.”

“Pay up!” Eyeball crows.

Jasper has been squarish and mannish all her life; she’d still that way, uterus or no uterus. Army’s face changes as she realized she was played.

“And _that’s_ how you keep winning Bluff,” she says in realization. “You’re good!”

Jasper swells with pride. Over Army’s head, Eyeball catches her eye and curls her mouth at the corner, and Jasper remembers the way she’d put it: Bluff’s just a game for donors who want to brag.

She lets them duke out the outcome of their bet, leaning back and turning her head to watch the bustle happening around them. The rec room opens onto a main thoroughfare for foot traffic; the canteen one way, consultation rooms and doctor’s offices down another, a bank of elevators against the opposite wall. A crowd mills in front of these. Like the wards, all the personnel are color-coded by uniform, but unlike those, these are determined by their specific jobs, and everyone here is black and white, which means —

She comes to attention abruptly. “Who’s that?”

Eyeball and Army turn their heads.

“ _Oh!”_ says Army, whipping back around with sudden distress. “Eyeball, quick, cover your boobs! That’s — that’s a Diamond!”

Jasper jerks. “You’re shitting me.”

She stretches to get a better look, aware in her peripheral of Eyeball rapidly straightening the straps of her suspenders so that they do the bare minimum at protecting her modesty.

The Diamonds are called as such because they’re national treasures: four old women who began with a meager but dependable cloning enterprise suddenly thrust into the great war machine, out of which the Donor Program sprang forth like a sword out of stone. Since it takes a long time to grow a clone to maturation, the Program couldn’t get started immediately, but anybody will tell you it doesn't matter; the moral boost alone was what changed the tide of the war. You’ve got a lot more to fight for if you’ve got the promise of a prolonged life at the end of it.

She’d seen them once or twice in the educational videos shown at Beta. They wore expensive clothes the same way they wear the world — like it was tailored for them — and the kind of boots you’d be afraid to step in a puddle with, and an attitude that says all these things excuse them from decency.

There _were_ four of them. 

Now there are only three.

“That one’s the head of the Yellow Affiliation,” Eyeball tells her in an undertone.

She’s lounging now, feigning casualness. She meets Jasper’s eyes and scoops her daily allotment of ice cream out of its tiny plastic cup, sucking it off the tip of her butter knife.

That knife is her most precious possession. It’s flat and dull, the kind of plastic cutlery that Amber liked buying by the hundred-count cases, because it saved her from doing dishes, but Eyeball wields it in a way that says she could probably fuck up a dude or rob a bank with it without even breaking the handle.

The nurses all think it’s cute — Eyeball with her XS cut and her harmless knife.

Jasper suspects when they put her down to complete, she’s going to take someone with her. Eye for an eye, so to speak.

“Yellow affiliate,” she echoes. “Peridot’s Yellow affiliated.”

Ingenuity and experimentation. Always pushing the boundaries of progress.

“So am I,” Eyeball responds.

“I … didn’t know that.”

“I expect the list of things you don’t know is as long as you are tall,” and when Jasper scowls, she just grins, knife between her teeth. Caught in the middle, Army pulls a face. Then Eyeball says, “She patted me on the head once. Yellow Diamond, I mean.”

“Oh,” says Jasper, cast-iron flat. “Good for you.”

“What do you think she’s doing here?” Army asks lowly.

“Coming up with some new way the humans can make our lives more difficult, I bet,” Eyeball answers.

This time, she doesn’t go unheard.

A dietician writing the day’s menu on the sign outside the rec room turns her head — her eyes landing first on Jasper, and then dropping to the two Rubies.

“The humans?” she echoes, and lets out a disbelieving laugh. “But you _are_ human!”

And there’s a beat where Jasper can _see_ the words line up on Eyeball’s tongue: _then treat us like we are!_

Quickly, she stretches her arm across the back of the bench, pinching Eyeball’s bare shoulder hard enough to raise a mark. She flinches away, then grits her teeth in a grin until the dietician looks away, and it’s a strange world where _Jasper_ is the one who has to have impulse control.

She looks back towards the commotion, Yellow Diamond still at its center with everyone orbiting around her. As a woman, she looks like she’s made entirely out of sickles, hammers, and scythes — her hair, the cold cut of her eyes, the sweep of her hand as she dismisses something said to her by the white-clad doctor at her elbow. Like if you took a workman’s tool and made it a person, it’d be shaped like her: hard and blunt-forced.

The effect on Jasper’s insides are similar; her stomach flattens out, trying to squeeze itself through her ribs. It takes her a moment to recognize the sensation as resentment — no, stronger than that.

As hatred.

Once, loving Lapis felt like an act of consumption, devouring both good and bad — whatever she was willing to give, whatever it took to sustain life. Jasper went and digested her, same as she did the sweep of vitamins and supplements laid out for them every day of their lives, and here she is, trace elements of Lapis Lazuli in Jasper’s guts and bones, and she looks at the Director and she thinks in her contaminated way, _what kind of person do you have to be to think, hey, let’s make a business out of raising human beings? Raise them, and then as soon as they stop legally being children, let’s harvest them for their organs._

Her hands curl into fists.

She’s saved from doing something stupid by the arrival of Zinc, who materializes out of the elevators and spots her before she can decide if she’s feeling up to his company — the disadvantage of being a head taller than everyone else.

He lifts a hand, and Yellow Diamond sweeps away, taking both her entourage and Jasper’s chance to say something with her. 

She channels her frustration into levering herself to her feet.

Distracted, the Rubies glance up too, then follow her trajectory.

Eyeball snorts, and Army leans in, dropping her voice into something polite but dubious. “Don’t you get … _tired_ of hearing about anatomy and tattoos all the time?”

“Eh, something useful comes out every half hour or so.”

Eyeball jabs Army with the butt of her knife and says, sotto voice, “She’s just learning about muscles so she can bulk hers back up,” to which Jasper can only shrug.

“Never know when you’ll have to play to your strengths,” she says, and Eyeball cackles in that way that makes Jasper think she heard something completely different from what she’d said.

 

*

 

They tell Peridot about it the next time she stops on her rounds.

She pauses in removing her driving gloves and looks at them, one to the other, then pushes her glasses up her nose. “You’re kidding.” 

“She’s your Director, too.”

“Arguably perfect,” Peridot agrees. “Logical, reasonable, not prone to letting sentiment cloud her judgement or impair her leadership. Essentially, she’s the _exact_ person you want to stay in charge for a hundred years, and thanks to her own Donor Program, she can.”

She’s lapsing into her excited lecture voice, finger poised midair like she’s drawing the truth to her. Eyeball heaves a huge sigh and picks up her mascara wand as a pointed hint, but Jasper doesn’t mind — Peridot gets stuck in impersonal carer mode too much, it’s nice to see a glimpse of the old didactic Peridot they used to groan about at the Cottages. 

(Did anyone tell Carnelian that nobody hated her as much as they all pretended? Did anyone — )

“No, really,” Peridot insists. “This is what happens when your government actually focuses its efforts on promoting the sciences — granted, yes, fine, they didn’t _start_ without the impetus of war, but we got there eventually, didn’t we? The first hurdle when it comes to transplanting vital organs from one host to another is the tendency of a recipient’s body to reject something it hadn’t created. In the old days, success came with a dozen setbacks.”

“Hold _still,”_ Eyeball mutters, reproachful.

Jasper bares her teeth, then subsides.

“ _Bam!”_ Peridot claps her hands together. “They figured out the trick to a near-universal acceptance rate — although type matching still plays a critical role, of course — and now we’ve got all of us,” she gestures around the ward. “But we’re expensive, and it takes too long to grow us.”

Eyeball pulls back, studies her handiwork, and says, “good, your turn,” and caps the wand, sticking it back in the bag and handing the bag over.

With sudden suspicion, Jasper says, “Peridot, did she do something weird to my face?”

“— and I, of course, have no personal insight into Yellow Diamond’s intentions moving forward, but — eh, what? Uh … no. Actually, it looks very good. Very feminine.”

Jasper looks at Eyeball, eyebrows up. 

She smirks. “What were you expecting? I’m not wasting the good stuff just to draw dicks on your eyelids.”

In reply, Jasper makes a gesture that could be interpreted as anything, but mostly means, _you walk around half-naked and armed at all times. My expectations never know what they’re doing._

Peridot watches curiously as they start the process again in reverse. Her own face is unadorned; neither she nor Lapis ever wore makeup at the Cottages that Jasper can remember. Whether that was just personal disinterest, or if having epicanthic folds meant that everyone else’s eye makeup tips didn't have the same effect, and the Cottages’ isolation left them with nobody else to ask, Jasper doesn’t know.

“But,” she glances around like her train of thought might be lying on the ground somewhere. “ _If_ I were heading the Yellow Affiliation, the next thing I would try to do is speed up our growth without compromising the development of our organs, so that we’re full-grown and ready to harvest in say, five years instead of twenty-five. _Then_ you could really focus on expanding business.”

There’s a moment of silence, and Jasper sets down her palette. Eyeball blinks.

“Am I right?” Peridot presses.

They look at each other, trying to digest it. The worst part is, it _does_ make sense, but all Jasper can picture is herself at five years old — and somehow fully-grown, laid out on a slab, terrified and unable to comprehend what’s happening, why everything has to hurt, why _she_ has to hurt so that someone else doesn’t have to. If they can barely fit _living_ in the years they’ve got, what the hell kind of life can be lived in only five?

 

*

 

Everyone enters the wards at the age of twenty-one, and almost everyone completes before they’re twenty-five. They tell you that record breakers exist, of course, just so that it doesn’t sound so final, but Jasper’s never met one. What would be the point? Maybe if you were a carer, she supposes, and had freedom of movement and a salary, and could hang air fresheners shaped like trees in your car and visit a cafe whenever you wanted, then maybe Jasper could see wanting to prolong your life — but all a carer does, really, is keep donors from losing their minds so they can make more donations, faster, and that’s got to take its toll, knowing you’re doing a good job _only_ if everyone you know and care about keeps dying.

At Strawberry Fields Recovery Center (and she isn’t sure how the place got that ridiculous name, but someone tells her it’s because of the painting in the front lobby — Jasper has no idea what that means, you don’t get to go through the lobby when you arrive in handcuffs,) there’s a certain level of pride among donors in being robust enough to go straight from one donation to another with minimal recovery time in between.

In fact, that’s one of the hallmarks of being Pink affiliated, isn’t it? 

You’re the strongest of them all, everyone says.

And the part of her that can’t help but think of everything the way Lapis would is heartbroken by this, that They — the doctors, the Diamond Authority, whoever — have tricked them all into thinking that dying quickly is _impressive._

“If you’re just going to sit there and stare at me,” she says without looking up, “make yourself useful and at least hold down that corner, will you?”

Eyeball blinks, then does so.

The paper stops shifting position with every drag Jasper makes across it, and with relief, she turns her charcoal on its side and gets to work. Lines become shapes, stark and aggressive.

She can’t shake the weight of Eyeball’s gaze, pulling on her as surely as her drawing pulls on the paper.

Gruffly, she asks, “Are you okay?”

“Thinking about what your pointy-headed carer said,” Eyeball answers. 

“Be more specific. Peridot says a lot of things.”

“Our time is limited. Everyone’s always super casual about reminding us just how limited we are.”

Jasper pauses, charcoal grinding to a halt on the page, and finally looks up.

The intensity in Eyeball’s expression makes her want to edge sideways, or glance over her shoulder to see who she’s really looking at. But Eyeball’s eyes follow her, as unerring as a magnet, and Jasper’s overwhelmed with the sense that she keeps trying to _tell_ her something, and Jasper keeps missing it.

“There’s so much pressure to make the most of every second, but what — what _choice_ do we have? We _have_ to make the most of it,” her knuckles whiten on the surface of Jasper’s paper. “We prolong _their_ lives, but that leaves us with too little time to spend it with dopes you don’t care about, you know, or pretending to like things that you don’t, wearing things you don’t want to wear.”

To demonstrate, she lifts her hands and snaps the bands of her suspenders. Jasper flinches, drawing her own arm back to cross it protectively over her nipples. Didn’t that _hurt?_

She remains like that for one beat, then two.

Then:

“I know,” she says, and it comes out so uncharacteristically quiet that Eyeball’s expression sharpens. She leans in to catch Jasper saying, “I know. I’d — I’d already made up my mind. I was _certain,_ because when you’re us, you don’t have time to be anything but certain.”

She stares down at her paper. She’d been working on something else entirely, but here she goes: it takes no effort for her mind to turn the charcoal strokes into the bramble patches, the hill, the gravel path she dragged Lapis over, barefoot and struggling.

Her exhale comes out slow. “She didn’t want to spend it with me.”

“Oh, bother,” mumbles Eyeball. Then, louder, “well, don’t get all _crystal_ about it, you clod of dirt —“

And it comes out so churlish that Jasper’s head comes up, a startled smile slingshotting across her mouth; she picked that up from Peridot.

“— you’re still doing right by her, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

Eyeball vents a frustrated sound out through her nose. “I _mean,”_ she says. “You’re being the best version of you that you can be, right? The one she loved when you were with her. Or — the version of yourself that _you_ loved because you were with her, whatever, I guess that's more important. Or — or shit, maybe you hate her, in which case you should go ahead and be the version of yourself that she’d despise, just to piss her off, I don’t know, I don’t care — oh, _fine,_ you _don’t_ hate her, stop growling. What the fuck, behave like a person.”

“Get to the _point.”_

“The _point_ — fuck you — is, do you love her enough to let her shape how you feel about yourself and others for the rest of your miserably short life?”

Pain gutpunches her. She feels like she’d ripped her stitches. 

_It’s not that simple!_ she wants to howl.

Once decided, Lapis had dragged her everywhere, forcing her into situations she never would have gone into voluntarily, and maybe it had only ever been about revenge for Lapis, but Jasper is on the other side and she _cares._ She _cares_ about these things and she wouldn't have, without her. Lapis Lazuli rearranged her so thoroughly it feels biological. 

She can't undo that, but — 

“She got me _arrested,_ Eyeball.”

Eyeball looks unimpressed. “Did you deserve it?”

Speechless, Jasper works her jaw for one moment, then another, and then settles for glaring, like she can shovel Eyeball into a ditch with her eyes alone.

But even with only one, Eyeball can out-glare anyone.

Once, Jasper thought _this_ was the whole reason Eyeball approached her when she was new to the ward. Jasper’s smashed-in face matched her own (“I'm Ruby, and I’ve got a natural pocket, want to see?” she’d said by way of introduction, lifting the ruby-red eyepatch to show the gape underneath, “beat that.”) So she aggressively absorbed her into her collection: Doc and Navy, Army and Leggy. The lot of them set apart because of their physical deformities, among a demographic prized for being without them.

“Are you in?” Eyeball asks her now.

“Sure, yeah,” Jasper fires back, feeling pissy. “Wait — in what?”

 

*

 

What she misses above all else is unrestricted access to the sky.

If she ever had to pick _one_ thing she loved best about the Cottages, it would be that. All of that _sky._

At Beta, her only access had been an asymmetrical patch in the inner courtyard (everything about Beta had been asymmetrical, honestly, being a sideways place shoveled into a corner to be taken care of later, buildings stacked together with seams that never lined up properly,) that they all watched during their regimented exercise hour. They would make it a game, trying to determine what the rest of the sky looked like based on that single jigsaw piece they could see: of cast-iron grey, of puffy armchair-stuffing clouds, of a blue so deep it felt like a challenge. At the recovery center, the only access you got — unless you had permission from the committee and your carer as escort to leave property, which was typically only granted as death wishes — was a balcony off the rec room, but you only got balcony privileges when you were cleared for your second donation. 

Jasper hasn’t been outside since the day she was arrested.

It had stormed that day, out at sea. You could see it from the fields, so that’s what she did: she gathered up Lapis, and the quilt from her bedroom, and they sat out on the rise past the chicken wire fence and watched the towering anvil-shaped cloud build itself up like smoke billowing up a sheet of glass. The wind flipped the corners of the quilt and stirred the shrubby remnants of heather, which summer had dried to the point of dead-bone whispering. It picked their hair up off their necks, set the ribbons of Lapis’s dress to dancing.

The storm won’t ever reach them. Something called orographic lift stops it — warm air from land meets the cool air coming in from the sea, and it’s like smacking into a windshield.

It was phenomenal to watch.

Aquamarine from the north point cottage got her hands on a twelve-pack of root beer in aluminum cans, so they took the last of the ice cream from Fluorite’s rock salt machine and made floats. The others were probably camped out in front of the TV, eating theirs with the windows propped open to let in the smell of oncoming rain. 

Lapis left her float untouched. She’d been distracted all day, and right then was no different; her head turned, not towards the storm clouds, but back towards the road, and Jasper eyed the hand she left resting on the quilt and thought about reaching for it. Her own hands were sticky from the ice cream, though, and she could easily picture the way Lapis would wrinkle her nose at the sensation and promptly disentangle them, and sigh that sigh that made Jasper feel like she was a tribulation to endure.

(She’ll remember this thought, always. Her last chance, and she hadn’t held Lapis’s hand because hers was _sticky.)_

She felt it, the way Lapis came to sudden attention: the air turning electrified in a way that had nothing to do with the weather out at sea.

“What?” she said.

A black car turned onto the dirt road. A plume kicked up behind it as it snaked up the curves towards the Cottages. As it drew closer, Jasper could make out the symbol stamped onto the side, one large diamond made of four smaller pastel ones.

“Did someone get their notice?” she said, baffled. “Can't be, they would give us more warning than this.”

The car rounded the buildings, and another possibility occurred to her.

“Shit, are they coming to _interrogate_ someone?”

Lapis rose from the blanket, brushed off her skirt, and said, “Let’s go see.”

They went back across the fields, arriving windswept and a little out of breath just as the car pulled up to park in the quad, where the delivery truck always dumped its bins. An Amethyst climbed out, followed by a Snowflake Quartz, both of them big and uniformed and clearly Pink. 

Guardians. And not office-duty guardians, either, like Leggy who’d been monitoring the chip readers the night of Lapis’s failed escape attempt, but big confident ones like the kind Jasper always aspired to be.

Lapis didn’t slow down. She walked right up to them.

She said, “That’s her. I have the proof.”

And Jasper —

Jasper, stupidly, looked over her shoulder.

There wasn’t anybody there, so who could Lapis be talking about? There’d be an audience soon enough, regardless: no one inside was going to want to miss this.

When she faced front again, unsuspecting, Amethyst and Snowflake Quartz were studying _her,_ clinical and interested.

“She’s been plotting her escape since the moment she arrived,” Lapis told them, bald-faced, with a quaver to her voice that was only just audible, and Jasper thought, _wait, what._ “She kept trying to get me involved, so I’ve got it all. The maps she made of the surrounding area — all the trips to the pier —“ 

“Wait, _what,”_ thought Jasper, this time out loud.

And just like that, she suddenly placed the tone in Lapis’s voice.

It was her, _I have to do this_ voice, her _just let me do this_ voice. It was the voice she used right before she was about to go down swinging.

With a slow, dawning sense that something awful and inevitable was happening, like an anvil-shaped cloud coming shoreward, a body dragged underwater, Jasper listened as Lapis spilled everything. All the research _she_ did while Jasper accompanied her as combination guardian and jailor, she now turned on its head and blamed on Jasper. And Jasper can’t argue, because yes, she had been there. Yes, her chip reader will put her in that place at that time. Yes, if you look in Moonstone’s room, you’ll find a manual on how to drive a boat on a shelf with maps of the typical currents along the coast, along with Jasper’s art. Yes, yes. From the very beginning, ma’am.

Horrified, Jasper stared at the side of Lapis’s head — watched her speak, trembling and Blue.

_It was her fault, ma’am._

_I colluded with her because I had no choice._

_No._ The word hung stillborn in Jasper’s throat. _No, that’s not how it happened. No!_

She drew breath to interrupt. Once, twice. 

But she couldn’t speak. She could only swell with it, a strange buzzing behind her lips and teeth.

Because come on.

Who do you think they’d believe?

And she stood there, dazed, because _oh,_ of course, of _course_ — what a brilliant solution! 

Turning Jasper in would get rid of the main hurdle holding Lapis back from her freedom. The one trick Jasper used to hold her down (“if you betray us and run, _we_ pay the price for it, don’t forget,”) would now backfire. When Lapis takes all of her valuable organs and makes a run for it, everyone’s going to know it’s Jasper’s fault for filling her head with poisonous thoughts unworthy of a Homeworld girl. The person they’ll want to punish, they’ll already have in custody.

“— be on my record, I was late for curfew once. That was Jasper, she dragged me — the notes should be in the Sapphire carer’s report, the injuries I —“

“That can be expunged from your record, I’m sure,” Snowflake assured her.

This, finally, broke Jasper’s paralysis, because that had been one thing she _knew_ she did right: Peridot came to her and said, _my friend, she’s going to try to steal a boat and live at sea, but she doesn’t know anything about boats, or anything, and I’m scared she’ll get hurt,_ and Jasper did what any guardian would do: she went and brought Lapis _home._

How dare she! How _dare_ she take that — that first, _good_ moment where Jasper had been _sure_ of herself — and make that about _her!_

“ _NO!”_ she exploded, and surged forward. “She’s _lying,_ she’s lying!”

Lapis’s head snapped towards her, and she took a single step backwards before she stopped and held herself still. Their eyes met with a crack like continents colliding; tectonic, oceanic, colossal in its force.

“Don’t you —“ Jasper snarled, towering tall and vengeful and glaring down at her, “— get tired of _always_ being the _victim?”_

Lapis’s nostrils flared. 

Leveling her medusa stare back at her, cold and bloodless, she said, “Next time, don’t drag a girl where she doesn’t want to go, got it?”

And the trap snapped shut.

Snowflake closed from the right, Amethyst from the left, and Jasper swung around. She drew her elbow back and thought cleanly about broken noses, her heel in a solar plexus, and _running_ — even though an objective part of her brain said that if it hadn’t worked for Lapis, how did she expect it to work for her?

And a less objective part of her brain, telling her: don’t run for the town. Run for the cliffs. The drop — the sea.

_The sea would be better than this._

Then something sparked, and she screamed —

— and screamed —

— and the beautiful, storm-colored sky went kaleidoscopic, and the next thing she knew, she was waking up in the backseat of a car with her hands cuffed behind her back and Peridot in the seat next to her, staring out the window. In her hands were a pair of large round glasses, which she slowly unfolded and slipped on over the place where there’d always been that oversized visor. She jumped when Jasper made a vicious noise.

“Oh,” she said, grim, and her hands dropped into her lap. “Hello, Jasper.”

_”Peridot — !”_

” — I’ll be your designated carer. You’ll be pleased to know that your case has been processed and is currently in review.”

“My — _how!”_ Her voice croaked out of her like a dead thing rising. “I’m not there! I need — a defense — to _explain_ — I haven’t seen anybody!”

“You don’t need to,” Peridot answered briskly. “The Authority has all the facts and will come to the most logical conclusion.”

“ _No!”_

Her voice cracked, and that horrible, robotic expression on Peridot’s face slipped.

It occurred to her, then, what the reason for the haste had to be. Donors on probation for criminal activity are taken to recovery centers to begin their donations early — that being the only reliable contribution they can make.

It cauterized her, neat and clean. “What’s the logical conclusion?”

“A woman on the list in Delmarva,” Peridot responded simply. “She needs a liver transplant. Your first donation is scheduled one week from today, and we need to get you prepped.”

 

*

 

“Are you in?” asks Eyeball.

 

*

 

Because everyone knows.

Jasper 55.1, cut XL8cv was put under the knife early for plotting to leave the country. She was going to steal her organs and run. She has a _reputation._

All those ideas she had taken for granted, those years of living with Lapis — “we’re worth _more_ than our prison, we deserve the chance to _live!”_ — it’s nothing that the donors here have ever had the confidence to _think,_ much less express, and they approach her because it’s new to them, and heady, and impossible, and they want her to validate it. They want her to tell them it’s okay to _want_ that.

So Jasper’s got a choice:

Deny everything, or give them this. The best part of herself, the Jasper that wouldn’t exist if Lapis Lazuli hadn’t taken her by the wrist.

Deny everything, or —

It’s not really much of a choice.

 

*

 

Everyone knows, too, a Pink donor will complete before their peers, every time.

All organs are harvestable from every donor, of course, they wouldn’t be a very good investment otherwise, but Pink affiliates in particular are known for having the strongest hearts. Get a Pink heart (or any Pink part, really, Pink donors are very robust people,) and you can guarantee it’ll far outlast whatever piddly one you had previously.

The demand is high, and no one has yet managed to live without their heart.

 

*

 

**The Cottages**  
**Year 20, Diamond Standard**

 

“Is she still looking over here?” Peridot hisses.

“No,” says Jasper.

“Yes,” says Lapis, and then, “ow! What!” And, “Oh, I was supposed to lie. Sorry, Peridot.”

Peridot groans. She tips forward until her forehead meets the quilt, and then she just keeps going, spreading out on her stomach and kicking the grass past the quilt’s edge with the toes of her galoshes. She’s dressed for rain: yellow vinyl dungarees that make funny noises when she walks, galoshes with ladybugs on them. It’s the end of Callunis. It hasn’t rained for weeks.

“I just told her the _truth,”_ she complains, muffled and facedown. “Why is she being like this?”

“I don’t think she wanted the truth.”

“Why! What’s wrong with being honest?”

Lapis and Jasper exchange a look over her prone body.

“That’s all you were being,” Jasper says, with an odd note in her voice. “Just honest. You weren’t being compassionate or understanding.”

Peridot lifts her head. Her visor’s crooked from where she had her face mashed into the quilt, but she doesn’t straighten it. She just props herself up, squinting at Jasper suspiciously.

“I’m not saying _I_ know how to be those things!” Jasper says hotly, when this goes on for an uncomfortably long time. “I’m just saying, you _can_ be honest without being cruel, but you didn’t bother.”

“Whatever, sure, but she didn’t have to get sensitive about it,” Peridot mutters.

“ _Yes,_ she did,” and now there’s real anger in Jasper’s voice.

“Oh, look,” Lapis interjects. “She’s going back.”

In her fury, Moonstone had picked herself up and moved further down the rise, putting as much distance as she could between them while still having a good view out to sea, which itself is not visible from here — the ground slopes gently downward from this point, turning sparser and scrubbier until it abruptly ends, dropping off the edge of a cliff. Moonstone must have decided she’s had enough of storm-watching, because even though the distant sky is still beaten-up and bruise-colored, pocked with lightning, she stands and folds up her lawn chair. She starts back across the field, and does not look back to see them watching.

The Cottages are separated by sex, a measly little fence the only delineation between the girls’ cottages and the boys’. At first, when they were new, it had almost felt _thrilling_ to sneak out to meet the boys with no supervision, but that usually only lasted as long as it took to play-act the few romantic scripts they knew, at which point the girls got bored and came back to the friendships and faces they knew best. Moonstone, who’d arrived at the Cottages a year before Lapis, was an uncommon exception.

Lapis doesn’t get it. Boys have their uses, sure, but they can’t do anything for her that she can’t do herself with the right equipment and a good pair of batteries.

“She had to have known,” Peridot complains lowly, watching Moonstone’s angry stride slow so that she can make an ungainly hop over the chicken wire. “She couldn’t _really_ believe …“

Jasper’s reply comes out bull-headed and belligerent.

“Why _not?”_

“Because it’s not true! It _can’t_ be true. There’s no _sensible_ reason such a thing would exist — ”

“How do you know?” 

“— common sense, that’s how!”

“None of the rules that applied to the rest of us in the other kindergartens ever applied to you, so —“

“And that’s the other thing!” Peridot exclaims, gesturing at her. “This — this _idea_ that Hailsham students are special and we would have been told. You saw her! She stood right over us and she said,” she does an unflattering impression of Moonstone’s voice, “ _’but you’re Homeworld’._ Do you really think that if we knew something _that_ important, that we’d really keep it to ourselves?”

Lapis purses her lips, and Jasper — who has always taken her smashed-in nose and stuck it exactly where it doesn’t belong — just returns Peridot’s look and says, “Well? Do you? Know something?”

“ _No!”_

A beat, and then Jasper transfers the look to Lapis.

“No,” Lapis confirms, much calmer. “We only found out about donations on accident. If there really was a way to delay those donations, do you think they would have told us?”

“Yes, but — even in code? Even —“

Jasper seems to realize what she’s saying, because her jaw clicks shut and the expression on her face freezes, going crystalline and strangely fragile. It stays like that for only a second, and then her brows come down with the force of a hammer falling, shattering it.

“Never mind,” she mutters, and Lapis thinks, _ah._

_She thought it was true. Right up until this moment, she thought we knew and we were keeping it from her._

“Good,” says Peridot emphatically, sitting up and straightening the corners of the blanket with a series of sharp, punishing tugs. “Because it’s stupid and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Up close, the sky is still quilted together with patches of hazy blue, stitched with jet-trails. But out at sea, the dark is a startling contrast, billowing clouds climbing up over each other. The horizon ends where the cliff meets the storm, abrupt as murder.

Then Peridot says, “How would you even _prove_ that? Is there a test like there is for carers?”

Lapis glances over at her. She’s known Peridot for far longer than she’s known love or self-worth or anything as abstract as that, so the expression on her face is instantly familiar: that’s the look Peridot gets when she’s frantically unpacking all her previous actions, wondering if she let some opportunity slide without realizing it. Wondering if she missed something critical.

 

*

 

The rumor is this:

If you’re in love and you can prove it, _truly_ prove it, then you can apply for a deferral. 

Not indefinitely, but to put off your donations for a year, maybe two — the wealth of the love you’re capable of putting into the world briefly outweighing the worth of your organs.

Peridot and Jasper don’t bring it up in front of Lapis again, but sometimes when she walks into a room they go abruptly silent as if a lid was slammed over a boiling pot, and she knows they were discussing it: Peridot needing to prove it false, to protect Hailsham and to protect herself from dwelling on it, and Jasper needing to prove it true, presumably for her own reasons.

Lapis mostly just thinks it’s sad.

 _This_ is the best anyone can do?

Generations of clones, their templates refitted and adjusted to make them better, and this is the best dream anyone can come up with? A _deferral?_

Is everyone so beaten-down, so resigned to their predetermined purpose that they can’t even come up with a good fairy tale about freedom? Just the idea of _delaying_ death is so scandalous that it can only be brought up in hushed whispers, standing in a field far away from everyone?

And anyway, it’s not true. Lapis knows it’s not true.

Right?

 

*

 

If nothing else, the encounter reminds Lapis that Moonstone’s main contribution to the rest of them is that everybody uses her abandoned room to store their spare projects.

“Hey, little Blue!” Citrine calls, seeing Lapis blow by. “How’s your escape plan going?”

“Fine, thank you, I’m not going to miss you,” Lapis answers, and nudges Moonstone’s door open with her heel.

Plywood boards make a half-dozen makeshift worktables all over the room, their edges feathered with thick marker. Left out on top are Fluorite’s half-finished tinkering, and not a few of Peridot’s, their parts disassembled and left in a mess that looks hopelessly disorganized to Lapis but probably makes sense to them. Some look like they’ve been abandoned for months, but the smell of sawdust still hangs thick in the close space. Underneath or behind them, she can make out the shape of Moonstone’s original room; her bed (absent its quilt,) her nightstand, and — her wardrobe.

“There,” she says to herself, and steps into the room.

She has to proceed carefully. Her arms are full, rolled-up maps starting to slide sideways out of her grip, and there’s no shortage of obstacles in her path.

In addition to the plywood, wire hangers have been punched into the ceiling so that clothes lines can run back and forth between them. Most of these have flowers hanging from them, upside-down and in various stages of drying, some of them from as far back as the first blooms of Floris, some as recent as the heather that exploded up and down the fields when the rains stopped. In between these, there’s paper. Lapis ducks around them, studying them curiously: here’s a collage with enough glue laid down to warp the paper; here’s another that’s been entirely covered in ballpoint pen, the tip pressed down so hard she can see the indent on the other side.

She reaches the wardrobe and wriggles the door open.

It’s already occupied.

An enormous green alien plush sits in the bottom of the wardrobe, its shiny vinyl eyes staring soullessly up at Lapis and the light behind her head.

“Huh,” Lapis says. 

Then, “excuse me,” and she nudges it aside so she can stash the maps in the corner.

They’re shoal maps that she checked out of the library and has already decided she isn’t going to give back. If she’s going to steal her organs, then she needs to practice on something smaller, and it’ll take her months of study before she has all the variables memorized. So _when_ she has a boat, she doesn’t just immediately run herself aground — between the tide, the submerged sandbanks, and the powerful continental current that pulls everything into the southern well, navigating her way out to pirate radio waters will be no easy feat.

So far, Lapis has been keeping all of her research in the suitcase that came with her from Hailsham.

It’s the first thing she remembers being absolutely _hers_ — her cut and edition number are stamped on the handle, the school coat of arms emblazoned on the front; four diamonds inside the larger one. So it seemed only fair to keep the pieces of her plan in there since it, too, is one of her sole possessions.

Escaping the Donor Program involves three major parts:

**1)** She needs to get rid of her microchip. It’s embedded in her wrist, which is a more treacherous thoroughfare of delicate streams than the ocean currents could ever be, but if she doesn’t, all she’s going to accomplish is leading the Authority right to the Crystal Gems.

**2)** She needs to know exactly where the Crystal Gems _are._ She won’t be able to live at sea indefinitely, and they have to have a base on shore somewhere. By researching local history from wartime to now, she has a few likely places picked out: in the economic boom following the end of the war, developers got optimistic, building resorts and theme parks and industrial housing to serve the expected influx of people, which came — but nowhere near the numbers that had been prepared for, leaving several of these places abandoned. Lapis is willing to bet the Crystal Gems live offshore, on one of these sites, but she needs more clues to determine _which,_ exactly, she should aim for.

**3)** She needs a boat. She’s read owner’s manuals cover to cover, but she has yet to actually _physically_ put her hands on one.

She closes the door to the wardrobe. 

“Okay,” she says bracingly, and then something moves in the corner of her eye.

Her head snaps around, heart making an unpleasant lurch in the direction of her throat, but —

But it’s just one of the drying artworks, disturbed by some breeze, and what had alarmed her is only a portrait. It’s a woman turned in quarter-profile, her expression drawn and frightened in a way Lapis recognizes viscerally. At first, she doesn’t think it’s anyone she knows, and then it is: that’s the Pink Director, the Diamond that was cut out of the Authority. She’d been banished because Rose Quartz had been Pink affiliated, and Rose Quartz betrayed them.

“What …“ she starts, reaching for it.

The floor should have given her away, but it isn’t until Jasper moves, her bulk blocking a portion of the light streaming through a gap in the curtains, that Lapis realizes she isn’t alone.

Startled, she yanks her hand to her chest and stumbles back a step, heel hitting the base of the wardrobe. “Jasper? Wh —”

It clicks.

Her eyes dart up. Of course — those clotheslines aren’t strung at a height convenient for anyone except …

“We had to, at Beta,” Jasper tells her, coming around to the portrait’s other side. “Everything was cheap and malfunctioning, so they had to pull in money wherever they could. I just never got out of the habit.”

The habit of … 

Oh, the art?

She gestures. “These are all yours?”

Jasper hesitates, then nods.

Again, Lapis looks at Pink Diamond — the familiar, unnerved expression on her face.

She doesn’t know anything about the Beta Kindergarten, hasn’t even seen pictures. (Peridot will get the chance, years from now, at the wish of one of her near-death donors, who will pull a sweater on over her hospital gown and sit in silence in the passenger seat the whole drive up. When they arrive outside the gates, she shoves the door open and holds onto the frame, staring and staring, with an expression on her face as blank and grey as the sky above. Then she’ll reel her head back and hawk up the largest, most vicious glob of spit Peridot’s ever seen, which lands in front of the sign: **BETA KINDERGARTEN.** ) Lapis doesn’t have any context for what it’s like, living in a compound dedicated entirely to raising clones — the walls painted a drab, sandy color, with no artwork or windows, the uneven hallways made of concrete. Jasper was seventeen years old before she took a proper walk — not just a march around an interior courtyard with a geometric cut-out sky, but a hike up an actual hill.

In a way, the Cottages were the most alien place Jasper could have landed: nothing in her upbringing could have prepared her for it.

At Hailsham, there’d been art classes; painting and sculpture overseen by Caretaker Lauren, who always told them art was the answer.

Once, Peridot stuck her hand into the air and asked, _The answer to what?_

 _Anything,_ she’d replied. _Everything. If you can’t have love, then at the very least, you can have art. Art is the response. You,_ she looked around at all of them, _are the response._

_The response to what?_

Her face grew tight and strangely sad.

_A question no one has been asking._

Which, in hindsight, Lapis supposes she understands now. These donors, do they have souls? Does it hurt, what we do to them?

_Yes, but we’ll keep doing it._

She reaches out. Her fingers press into the soft spot on the inside of Jasper’s elbow. The light turns Jasper’s eyelashes as auburn as her hair when she blinks, looking down at that hand on her arm. Lapis hears herself ask, “Do you paint? I know there’s some paint in the toolshed, I don’t know if it’s the right type, but it might be a place to start …”

 

*

 

Jasper pries the lid off the can, studying the perfect sphere of color that clings to its underside before it starts to distort as it drips.

“No,” she decides, in her gravelly way. “It’s paint, but it’s not good for painting. We used to have these little bricks — they came in three main colors and you’d mix them up into whichever color you needed. Less waste.”

“Oh, well, too bad,” says Lapis, hovering in the doorway to the shed. The strange feeling that’d overcome her in Moonstone’s room has vanished, and now that she’s performed her one act of compassion for the week, she feels like she needs a nap.

“But …” Jasper trails off thoughtfully. “It _is_ good for painting.”

Lapis frowns. “You just said —“

Jasper looks up, and shows all of her teeth. “I wonder if we’ve got any tarp anywhere,” she says, which is how Lapis finds herself roped into repainting Jasper’s room.

It’s the last room on the second floor, tucked at the end of the hall in the manner of a space that probably was never supposed to be a bedroom. Lapis hasn’t been in here much, but apparently neither has Jasper: decorations are sparse and consist mostly just of a chin-up bar in the doorway and a couple certificates from Jasper’s guardian training that she’s pinned to the walls.

The roof comes down at a sharp slant over the bed, and the light fixture hangs low enough that Jasper has to duck under it every time she enters or risk bashing her head.

“How did you wind up with this one?” Lapis asks in exasperation as they haul furniture around.

“My guess? Little T thought it would be funny.”

“It’s _hilarious!”_ the Tourmaline in question calls through the open bathroom door, where she’s doing her make-up. She uses bold colors and it always comes out as asymmetrical as her haircuts, like a picture of a rock star Lapis saw once on a cereal box. “Tall people in short rooms. Always quality comedy.”

“You need to get out more,” Lapis shouts back to her.

She materializes in the doorway, and claps one hand on the chin-up bar, the other pressed dramatically to her own forehead.

“Out?” she echoes, her voice a-flutter. “Into the big, wide, scary world? Without my stalwart guardian? I’m likely to be robbed and husked out. They’d sell my organs on the black market! Oh, no, I shan’t, I’ve got to stay here.”

“Wow,” says Lapis, simultaneous with Jasper’s, “I’d like to see someone try to rob you. _That’d_ be quality comedy.”

Mostly, Lapis had assumed that guardians at the Cottages would serve much the same function as the guardians at Hailsham did: to do most of the cleaning, to materialize in the back of rooms wherever the students gathered in any serious concentration, to frown sternly over indian rug burns and welts from bullies.

Here, it’s just Jasper and two others to keep watch over six houses. Both Jasper and the boy guardian look the part, enormous and Pink affiliated, but the third is Aquamarine from the north point cottage. She’s a plump girl of average height who approaches everything, even her friendships, with a bright and ruthless efficiency, and the first time Lapis met her was when they were bringing over pots of stew to share after the week’s shipments turned out to contain bad potatoes. Aquamarine thanked them and promptly directed them to sort the stew into individual Ziplocs they could stash in the freezer, and when Lapis passed her, she caught her arm.

“A Lapis Lazuli?” she’d asked, her curious eyes cutting her into component parts, and Lapis nodded. “I haven’t gotten a chance to examine one of you up close before. It’s curious. Your original and mine must have looked similar in their day. From the same people, maybe?”

Aquamarine didn’t have the same tightly-pulled face or the eyes that made Lapis and Peridot stand out among their housemates, but Lapis could see what she meant; it’s in their build, their coloration. They _could_ share a common ancestry. Sometimes on the TV shows, someone will drop a word like “ethnicity” and Peridot will rummage up a dictionary, so if they’d grown up in the outside world maybe this wouldn’t be such a mystery, but as is, this information wasn’t deemed necessary for donors to know.

“Do you know anything about our originals?” she asked anyway.

Unsurprisingly, Aquamarine shook her head, not letting the food division slip out from under her critical eye but also clearly trying to give Lapis’s question her attention. “No. But they must have been important people, don’t you think? To be immortalized in us?”

“I doubt that,” Lapis says flatly. “They probably just got genetic samples off of anybody who’d stand still long enough to get their skin scraped off. We’re disposable, no need to be picky.”

But Aquamarine smiled.

Later, Lapis will see enough of those smiles on Jasper’s face to recognize it. Mentally, she dubs it their “guardian smile,” because it’s the look of someone whose confidence in the people around them is hard-won, but right now it’s new, and unfamiliar, and not something Lapis has ever felt.

“Well, wherever we came from, we’re valuable now,” Aquamarine had said.

A guardian’s main job is to be on the lookout for illicit behavior: drinking, excessive eating of non-prescribed foods, illegal substances, whatever. Things that can harm or alter a donor’s insides — which are not, after all, their property. But in Lapis’s experience, none of those things have the allure of something that’s forbidden, so nobody’s very tempted. It’s like the idea of seeing another country or driving a bus: drinking or drugs just don’t exist as a possibility, so in actuality, a guardian’s job becomes whatever’s necessary; if you slip into lethargy, or fight too much with your roommates, or attract unwanted attention from the boys’ side of the fence, you can bet a guardian’s going to be the first person in your corner.

(Jasper, perhaps, could use some practice with the compassion part, but she gets into everybody’s business just fine.)

A guardian’s got to come with you if you go into town, too, and initially Lapis thinks that’s just an excuse to do more policing, but she quickly finds out it’s the other way around. The town knows they’re there. The opportunistic know exactly what time of year the new donors show up at the Cottages, having never had money before or any contact with the outside world. Guardians are there to keep you safe from _them_ — not only from the little scams but also the bigger, more frightening dangers.

“How likely is it that we’ll get straight-up murdered if we try to go without you?” Peridot had asked, kind of wistfully.

“Have you ever been stuck in a room with yourself?” Jasper returned, droll. “It won’t take long.”

When they’re done, Jasper’s room is lighter, brighter, and surprisingly spring-colored. The paint’s a little uneven in places, because they’d already done one section before Fluorite yelped and dug up some edging tape, which made everything much easier. Where do people even _learn_ this stuff?

“We avoided disaster,” she tells Jasper, pleased. “That never happens.”

“Hey,” and then Jasper’s right there at her elbow. Lapis blinks at the men’s clothes and the muscles she can see underneath them, right in front of her, and then up into Jasper’s face, which is wearing an expression she hasn’t seen before. “You helped me. You didn’t have to. I appreciate it.”

“Oh,” comes out of Lapis in a strangely airless way, and she clears her throat, realizing that it’s true. Just that fast, annoyance replaces her embarrassment. She passed up a _nap_ for this. “Yeah. Okay, whatever.”

 

*

 

“— is right, they could have used anybody in the beginning,” Peridot’s saying. “It wouldn’t have mattered what the quality of the original was, since all of the effort would go into the _nurture_ of the clone, not its nature.”

Lapis looks back and forth, hunting for counter space and already knowing it's futile. Like everywhere else in the cottage, the kitchen is cluttered with the built-up detritus of eight lives playing out in close quarters: the space Lapis needs to use to cook is currently overtaken by the usual jumble of discarded thermos lids, outerwear, and the most unwanted protein bars, as well as pet licensing forms that Little T’s supposed to fill out for the terriers, and dirty dishes that can’t quite fit in the precarious stack already in the sink, and a bouquet of flowers in a water pitcher that Lapis herself plucked from a neighboring cottage’s garden. She vents out a frustrated sigh.

Peridot draws herself up, putting a hand to her chest. Her voice comes out phlegmy, but it’s not stopping her.

“And _I,”_ she says with self-importance, “postulate that in the beginning, they collected the widest sample of material available just to cover all their bases, but after generations of tweaking, proven templates emerged. These donors possessed genetic traits that were much more useful than the others, so they repeated them.”

“Here,” says Lapis, and hands the soup pot off to the side. “Hold this.”

“Okay,” says Jasper, who is, of course, standing within arm’s reach.

(“Don’t you think that’s _weird?”_ Lapis complains, on one occasion where Jasper’s off playing escort to a group from another cottage. She’s aware, all of a sudden, of an absence at her back.

Carnelian looks up from … whatever it is she’s doing with those balloons and the squirt gun she got in the mail.

“Doesn’t she just want to spend time with you?” she asks, politely baffled.

Lapis stares at her. “No one … _wants_ to spend time with me, Carnelian.”

“Oh,” pops out of Carnelian’s mouth. “I didn’t know that’s how you felt about it. Well, then.”)

She pulls down a cutting board shaped like Dorova’s neighboring state of Delmarva, finds the only clear patch of counter available, and starts with the vegetables. Jasper stands ready with the stock pot to catch them after they’re done being diced into little pieces. It will be soup day for the next couple of nights: Peridot’s sick and has been annoying everyone by watching videos about luxury cruises in the computer room and probably sneezing on the keyboard.

“— I’m talking blood types that are universally accepted. Good predisposition for liver and kidney health, no history of heart disease,” Peridot ticks these off her fingers, then waves her hands around. “All those things are ideal to have in donor, so that’s why you’ll get repeats of a template even within the same class. Peridots — who are the best,” she allows humbly,” and Jaspers, Pearls, and Rubies. Oh, geez, Rubies _everywhere.”_

“So what you’re saying,” ventures Jasper, who’d been following this long-winded train much better than Lapis had. “Is that the Authority beefed us up, and we’re now much bigger and better than a regular human would be.”

“ _Yes,_ exactly!” Peridot shouts with enthusiasm, and then sneezes.

Lapis and Jasper both yell with disgust, then exclaim in unison, “Use your elbow!”

“Right, yeah, got it,” and Peridot wipes her nose on the inside of her sleeve. “Usually that’s my line.”

Jasper watches this display, then says fatalistically, “We’re all going to get sick.”

“Probably,” Lapis agrees, and goes up on tiptoes to get to the lazy susan for spices. She deliberates over pepper and paprika, eyeballs the sniffling Peridot, and decides to up the level of each ingredient to Punishing. In her peripheral, she sees Jasper duck her head to hide a smirk, unsuccessfully.

“How are you going to get the pot full?” she asks her in an undertone.

Lapis looks at the sink, towered so high with dishes there’s no way to reach the faucet even using only the edge of the pot.

“Water witchery,” she answers, meaning, _I have no idea._ “Do you doubt me?”

For a beat, Jasper doesn’t say anything, and Lapis glances over and catches the tail end of an expression she has no trouble interpreting as it leaves her face. _Considering you have yet to do the one thing you keep telling everyone you’re going to do, I_ do _doubt this._

Lapis’s good feeling crashes down on top of her head, and she scowls.

But before Jasper can say anything cruel that she’ll be forced to parry with something even crueler, the screen door bangs open and Carnelian barrels through.

She shoves her back up against the door so it shuts, then takes in the scene. Her hiking boots are smeared with mud and she’s got something glossy pressed to her chest, and she waves her wrist in the vague direction of the chip reader. It beeps.

They look at her. She looks back at them.

“I found our originals,” she says breathlessly.

 _Slam!_ The pot comes down on top of the cutting board, nearly sending the knife spinning to the floor.

Peridot sits bolt upright. “What!”

“Are you _sure?”_ says Lapis, swinging around.

But Jasper’s looking at what Carnelian has in her hands, her brows hunkered down.

“Is that a dirty magazine?” she demands.

“It sure is!” Carnelian trills, and she comes forward to slap the catalogue down on the table. “It’s a magazine with dirt in it!”

They drop what they’re doing and crowd around her. Lapis is half-expecting a naked woman in some salacious pose, so it takes a moment for her to realize what she’s actually looking at: a wall of gemstones in little cells, each one individually lit to show its facets to best effect. The catalogue’s from the Dewsonian.

“Special edition,” Carnelian tells them excitedly. “Precious gems and metals. Obviously you can’t buy what’s in their collection since they’re world-class, but they sell smaller pieces. You can even get them set as jewelry!”

Immediately, Peridot reaches for it. “Am I in here?”

“That’s what I wanted to see!”

Peridot drags the catalogue over to her place setting, and the next few minutes are lost in her flipping pages, the rest of them peering over her shoulder and exclaiming every time they see a name they recognize.

“Look! There’s Citrine!”

“Who knew Agate could come in so many different colors? What — no, she’s not _ugly,_ what’s _wrong_ with you!”

“Do you ever wonder why they chose to name us what they did?” Peridot asks, flipping to the next page. They all scan it quickly — the other gemstones are nice and whatever, but honestly, they’re just waiting for their own to show up. 

Carnelian answers, “It’s because we’re precious.”

“ _Ugh,”_ say Peridot, Lapis, and Jasper together, which for them is such a typical reaction to Carnelian that she just smiles, for all appearances unperturbed.

Peridot flips the next page, and the noise is immediate.

“There!” Jasper points, simultaneous with Carnelian’s, “Oh, look, it’s me!”

Carnelian the stone looks like blood in water, blooming in swirls of deep red across its surface. On the opposite page, the catalogue advertises a stone so dark blue it looks like a midnight sky, flecked with sugar-colored pinpricks of stars. It’s available as a ring and as a pendant, and Lapis leans forward to read where Jasper’s finger is pointing: _Lapis lazuli._

At her elbow, Carnelian tilts her head.

“You know, harvesting gemstones actually isn’t that different from harvesting donors,” she says musingly, and it comes out with her usual lightheartedness, so it takes a moment before her words register. “You spend years cultivating them in adequate conditions — and then you take a drill to them and sell the most valuable parts.”

There’s a long pause.

With a near-audible creak, Jasper, Lapis, and Peridot slowly turn their heads to stare at her.

“What the fuck, Carnelian,” Peridot says, and then sneezes.

 

*

 

The library has a dusty rack full of pamphlets advertising local attractions, and a bulletin board by the activity center where civilians get permission to post their own flyers. Lapis likes all the cut-off tabs with the phone numbers, likes the feathery feeling of running her fingertips across them.

Peridot spends a whole afternoon once going through every last one of these, picking things she thinks they would want to try.

Money’s a roadblock for the majority of it, since of the three of them, Peridot’s carer salary doesn’t kick in until she leaves the Cottages and Lapis’s disinterest in employment is second only to her disinterest in … well, everything else, and by wordless agreement they decide against asking Jasper for funds, since she doesn’t need another reason to feel superior. But it still leaves a good handful of things they can explore — especially if they bring the others.

“You’d probably like the outdoors more if you gave it a shot,” she tells Lapis.

Automatically, she wants to _not_ like it, just to prove that superior little statement false, but unfortunately, Peridot has a point.

The geography at the southern tip of the country is actually much the same as it had been at Hailsham, Lapis finds — miles and miles of desolate, open cliffs and a plunge to the white-capped sea below. On a map, they look like crooked teeth, turning the whole southern edge into a fearsome smile. She doesn’t think these cliffs are made from chalk, but neither does she know enough to say that they aren’t.

In the rare places the coastline drops close enough to sea level to form anything remotely resembling a beach, civilization crawled in and staked its claim.

A long time ago, the town by the Cottages sprung up like an auditorium around a central stage, built around the bite-sized chunk of a bay that has since been expanded with a marina and a proper waterfront. The rest of the buildings and streets fan upwards and out from this point, sometimes so steeply it’s only navigable by one-lane roads that switchback sharply on themselves. Even with all this hiking around, Peridot somehow finds the breath to complain that one strong gust of wind is all it’ll take to send her tumbling all the way to the sea.

Some of what she takes them into town to see is awful. There’s a comedy show that turns out to be one man with a microphone in the back of a sandwich shop, but nothing he says is comprehensible, even when other people laugh.

Jasper leans over to whisper to Lapis. “Do you know what women’s jobs are?”

“Funny, apparently,” Lapis whispers back. Then thinks about it. “Or too difficult for men to do, so he’s got to point and laugh to cover his own inadequacies.”

“That sounds right.”

“You _guys,”_ Peridot whispers, aggravated. They’d been doing that the whole show.

Some of it’s okay. Peridot and Jasper both enjoy stargazing, which has the added benefit of there being an official Night Sky Spot close enough to the Cottages that they don’t have to scrounge up bus fare. But Lapis is too cold even in her own room under her own quilt, why would she volunteer to sit outside and freeze, too?

But then there’s dancing.

 _That’s_ a hit with everyone. 

The whole cottage signs up for lessons, actually, since there’s a discount for groups and after discussing it with the guardians, Little T okays the expense because it’s good for moral, and it’ll give everyone something to do other than pointedly leave empty chairs around the table for Big T and Amber.

Not everyone sticks with it, of course. Citrine drops out as soon as they move from solitary steps to practicing with partners, but Lapis genuinely enjoys this. The complicated stuff wakes her up.

The class is about twenty people big and takes place in a second-story studio off an alleyway that pretends it’s a street, in a room that’s all mirrors and slippery wooden floors. Lapis doesn’t pay much attention to anyone who isn’t the instructor or her fellow donors, but Peridot makes everyone laugh with her questions (“can I wear cans? To make myself taller?”) and her sotto voice commentary when she partners with Lapis for the tango for the first time. (“I saw this on a show once, Lapis! There’s supposed to be flowers in our teeth, can you imagine?”)

The instructor turns out to be just as fascinating as the dances.

She’s a watery-eyed woman who carries a pair of smudged glasses hooked through the collar of her shirts, and she’ll lose them at least once a class as she turns sharply while demonstrating some move and they go clattering across the floor. She’ll just kick them to the side and retrieve them later. Fluorite asks what their purpose is, since she seems to wear them irregularly, and she answers: “for reading.”

It turns out that … just _happens,_ apparently, when you get old.

“Like your wrinkles!” Peridot says, and, “ow!” when Little T trods on the inside of her foot.

“Oh,” says the instructor, her hands darting towards her face self-consciously. “I suppose …”

“Don’t listen to her,” Jasper says. “Your wrinkles are — fine? They’ve got good definition.”

For some reason, that doesn’t seem to help.

Carnelian wriggles into the conversation, coming up underneath Jasper’s arm with a bright smile.

“They’re very cool!” is her contribution. “It means you’ve worn your skin so long it’s started to tear! Isn’t that awesome? We’ll never get to do that.”

“Oh,” says the instructor again, even more self-consciously.

Then, looking around at them all, she makes a valiant attempt to change the subject. “You must all be very good friends.”

As one, everyone looks to Lapis and Peridot.

Peridot immediately pops up onto tiptoes to sling her arm around Lapis’s neck, squeezing their cheeks together. “Since infancy!”

“Not _that_ long,” Lapis protests, going limp like an eel to extract herself.

“That’s right,” Peridot allows. “Didn’t you try to drown me once?”

“Only _once._ The Falls are a glorified _fountain,_ that hardly even counts.”

The instructor blinks, smiling bemusedly, and looks at the rest of them.

“No,” says Citrine, and Little T steps on her instead.

Fluorite shrugs. “I tolerate them,” she says reluctantly, even if the twitching of her mouth is a dead give-away. “But I wouldn’t call them friends.”

“I go where Lapis goes,” rumbles Jasper.

“Oh,” the instructor says, then gives up.

Later on in the curriculum, she tries once or twice to split them up, to get them to mingle with the others or to partner them with the men in the class for practice. All this earns her is several blank looks until Carnelian thinks to say, “No, thank you.” Lapis jerks a thumb at Jasper.

“I’m good, thanks, I’ve got her,” she says. “She can dance circles around all of them.”

Jasper frowns.

“Thanks,” she says, like she doesn’t really mean it, and it takes a moment before Lapis realizes that Jasper thought she was being sarcastic.

But she wasn’t. As the lessons get more intensive, partnering with Jasper becomes Lapis’s favorite part.

There’s something effervescent, wildly freeing about dancing with someone you’re not sure won’t throw you into the nearest wall, because you’ve got to trust yourself to know where your feet are coming down. There’s no chance to double-check, no chance to doubt your partner, and Lapis’s heart and lungs and visceral insides live for that moment: her feet off the ground, Jasper’s hands in hers, the wordless communication of where they’re going to go next, the pull and the push. It’s like a fight, but _better._

When they dance, other people make room.

When they dance, everyone stares.

And until this moment, Lapis hadn’t noticed that every time they came into town, people would avoid her eyes as soon as they realized what she was. It makes her feel like a medusa, like they think if they look right at her she’ll turn them to stone, and she wants to fly at their faces with her nails out.

_Look at me, LOOK AT ME._

So there’s something almost satisfying about _making_ them stare, that makes her bare her teeth before Jasper’s arm goes around her waist.

Satisfaction is thin on the ground in Lapis’s world. She’ll take it.

There’s an open-floor period right after class for the students who want to stay and practice outside of their structured time. Little T, Fluorite, and Carnelian will usually split, heading home — or to the corner shop for chocolates, or down to the pier, or whatever they want to do — but Lapis, Jasper, and Peridot stay behind to catch that feeling for another ten, fifteen minutes, and everyone gives them room.

Lapis turns eighteen while all this is going on (outside, they’re called “birthdays”, and Lapis isn’t sure what a donor equivalent would be. Cooked-days? Uncorked from the incubator-days?) and one of the other students approaches them during cooldown, having watched Lapis and Jasper do something the instructor calls “enthusiastic” and everyone else calls “scary” — except for Haley, a diminutive woman who refers to everything with a media reference, and she calls it “very Dirty Dancing.”

“Hey,” he says, head tilted and eyes curious. “You know there are clubs in town, too? If you want to come with me sometime. For something more … ah, unstructured.”

“Yes,” says Peridot instantly.

Jasper says, “what time?”

He makes a vague gesture. “Like, ten?”

“Oh,” they all say in unison, exchanging dismayed glances. “No, thank you. We have curfew.”

His eyes widen with alarm.

“Curfew?” he echoes. “How _old_ are you?”

“That’s easy!” Peridot tells him with an airy wave of her hand, as Jasper yanks the door open for them. “Just take two years off the current date!”

They sweep out onto the landing, the rickety staircase leading down to the street, but not before they hear him say, puzzled, “Two thousand and …”

And that doesn’t make any sense, but.

Humans rarely do.

(It’s not until later that it occurs to Lapis that maybe not _everyone_ lives their lives by the Diamond Standard. That it’s not enough to _raise_ donors differently, house them separately, allow them access to only very certain kinds of information, but they have to make _time_ pass differently for them as well. Just another way to drive home that it’s _impossible_ to ever think of yourself as belonging to the outside world.)

For her not-birthday, there’s cake, and the girls give Lapis a top that’s all ribbons, a perfect match for her favorite dancing skirt. She licks frosting off her fork, then stands and spins in place so her skirt bells out, ribbons trailing, and everyone becomes a blur of color and smiling faces.

Peridot — who’s incapable of getting anything for anyone without also getting something for herself — waits until the next time they go dancing to show off her own purchase, a bowtie that the same shade of blue. They compliment each other, Lapis in her blue flowing outfit and Peridot in a snazzy jacket and bowtie. They’re good enough at the tango now to take possession of the floor after class, swinging themselves around in dramatic sweeps, feeling daring and ridiculous.

“Isn’t there supposed to be a rose?” Jasper calls to them, sitting cross-legged by the tape player. “In your teeth?”

“Suggestion noted and ignored,” Peridot replies without heat, and switches her grip on Lapis.

After, when they bow out to let another group practice, Peridot turns to her next to the cubbies with all their stuff and tugs on her lapels, looking pleased.

“Do you like it?” she asks, with a gesture.

Grinning, Lapis leans close to tell her, “You look like you’re from one of our scripts. The domestic one!”

Peridot flashes teeth. “Stay there!”

She backs up several paces, then comes swaggering in like they’re at the front of Caretaker Ian’s classroom again.

“HI HONEY,” she bellows, chest puffed out. “I’M BACK FROM JOB.”

Trembling with laughter, Lapis casts a look around, then snatches up the nearest dry-erase board and pretends it’s a tray of cookies. “HI HONEY,” she shouts back, enunciating clearly.

“I NEED A DRINK,” Peridot tells her.

They hold the tableau for another moment, then fall all over themselves giggling, and it’s so much better than a comedy show.

Jasper looks alarmed. “If you even _think —“_ she starts. You can practically see all the handouts she had to read about the detrimental effects of alcohol on the body flash before her eyes.

They hush her.

“You’re no fun!” 

“It’s just a script!”

Finally, she rounds them up and gets them to sort out their boots and scarves, because it’s a long walk back to the bus stop if they want to get home before curfew.

They pour out into the street, where the air has turned chilly enough that it flips up its collar, hunches its shoulders, and comes rushing in between the buildings. It hits like a slap to the face, and Lapis yelps, ducking back behind Jasper, whose height and bulk are good for exactly two things: blocking the wind, and attracting the ire of whoever has to sit behind her on movie night.

“Do we have any cocoa mix left —“ she starts to ask Peridot, already thinking ahead to the cluttered cottage kitchen, and warm drinks.

Jasper jerks to a sudden stop, and Lapis bumps into her back.

“What — “

Peridot grabs her arm. 

“ _Fire,”_ she breathes.

 

*

 

The pier is burning.

 

*

 

Or — no, Lapis realizes, as the scene in front of her coalesces into a coherent whole. It’s the buildings along the waterfront — the boathouse and the police station, gone up bright orange and sparking. Smoke billows out the windows and gushes in plumes from where a roof caved in. Vehicles that look like emergency response crowd the streets leading down to them, lights swirling as small and multicolored as insects. Lapis can smell it all of a sudden, an acrid stench of burnt plastic.

But the pier hasn’t burned yet, either too wet and too old to make for good kindling, or because it wasn’t a target.

Peridot digs her nails in. “Look!”

In an attempt to save them should the fire spread to the neighboring structures, the boats that had been tied to the marina have been let loose, bumping up against each other like debris in a bathtub. One little dinghy wrestles free of the rest and makes a break for open water, picking up speed as two police boats immediately peel away in pursuit.

“Did someone just — _steal a boat?”_ Jasper radiates disapproval.

A beat passes.

Then, in unison, Peridot grabs Lapis’s arm with both hands and Jasper grabs the other.

“Hey!” she protests, scowling, and then it clicks. “Oh, for the — I’m not trying it, let me _go!”_

She wrests herself free of both of them, and starts forward. No matter where you go in town, everything curves back down towards the bay, drawn in like the spokes of a fan, so there isn’t anywhere you can go where your eye isn’t drawn down to the spectacle below.

After a moment spent searching the street, Lapis zeroes in on the closest old-looking person, a woman standing under a road sign holding a Styrofoam cup of tea. The loud teal-and-pink pattern on the cup matches the neon colors of her jacket. The tag from the teabag flutters as she lifts the cup to her lips, watching the commotion unfold, and she looks so unimpressed by the whole thing that Lapis goes right up to her.

“What’s going on, do you know?” she demands.

The woman spares her a brief glance, eyes flicking from Lapis to her companions and back. “It’s those pirates.”

Lapis’s eyebrows hike. “ _Here?”_

Eagerly, Peridot crowds in close with them. “Why would pirates want to burn down the waterfront?”

She looks surprised. “Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that, but I do know that’s who they’re chasing. See them boats?”

Jasper’s voice drags rough up onto the pavement to join them, folding its arms and scowling. “ _Those_ are the pirates? The ones that say whatever they want on the radio?”

“One and the same!”

“Oh, no,” says Lapis, knowing at once that it’s going to end badly. “They should know better than to come this far south! The continental current’s just going to drag them right back into the well. Anyone can set up an ambush.”

The woman’s eyes are a curious gleam, reflecting firelight.

“You’re right, they must be new,” she says, and sips at her steaming tea. “But the cops have got to make a show of chasing bootleggers where they can, since them’s never had the manpower to invade the temple.”

It surges through Lapis like blood, this casual acknowledgement of what she spent _months_ researching, eliminating the unlikelys until she had a short list of potential places the Crystal Gems might have picked as their home base. The temple — the old carnival grounds built out to sea during the post-war boom, the boardwalk, the cove. Perfect places to hide if you routinely have to go out to international waters to broadcast your shows. A perfect place to _hide,_ just in general.

(But if _she_ can figure it out, and if a civilian on the street can figure it out, then does she dare hope they’re safe from the Authority?)

She steps to the side, aware of her surroundings only in snatches; a smear of light, plum-stained sky, a woman in neon. She missteps, stumbling off the curb into the street.

Then she bolts.

Behind her, someone shouts _”Lapis!”_ , but she’s got her skirts hiked in one hand to free her legs and she's gone.

Full-pelt, she sprints through traffic.

Horns blare. She leaps back up onto the sidewalk and vaults over a retaining wall. 

There’s a thundering in her ears, heartbeat so loud it makes it impossible to hear if Peridot or Jasper are following her. 

_Go. Go go go go._

She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t look back. 

All roads curve towards the sea, and that’s where she goes. The pavement turns to cobblestone under her heels as her descent takes her into the older part of town, the road sloping so steeply in places it’s all Lapis can do not to pitch forward onto her face. As is, the persistent downward momentum makes her feel like wings have sprouted from her back, propelling her forward twice the distance for every stride she takes.

The smoke gets thicker the closer to the waterfront she gets. The tightness in her chest is punishing.

She grabs a lamppost and uses it to swing her around another sharp switch in the road, and then clatters down a narrow stone staircase. 

_Go go GO._

The sea’s close enough to taste, the usual fish and brine present under the taste of burning, and she can see the waves frothing over the rocks, the smaller stones winking in the light as they’re dragged away. She always thought beaches had to have sand to count as beaches, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not where she’s headed.

She wants the pier.

“Lapis!”

Jasper doesn’t bother with the stairs. She just _drops,_ crashing onto the ground in front of Lapis and blocking her path.

Lapis skids to a halt, then pivots to go back the way she came, except Peridot’s closing in from that way, sandwiching her between them and the stone wall that has to be older than the town. It’s marked in stained striations from where the water’s overflowed the high tide line over the centuries. Everything’s louder and closer down here; the sea, the emergency crews surrounding the burning buildings further down, her heartbeat screaming: go, go, _go._

Head twisting back and forth, she sinks down and plants her hands on her knees, panting desperately.

“ _Please — “_ comes out of her in one great heave. “We — have to help them! They’ve — got to get away!”

“Who —“

“— the _pirates?”_

“Are you _crazy?”_ Somehow, Jasper doesn’t sound breathless at all. “I’m taking you home!”

“Like hell you are!” Lapis flashes back, rounding on her. “Not _now!_ We’ve got to — !”

“NO.”

“Yes!” 

“ _Listen._ If the human police think it’s arson, they’re going to get handcuff-happy, really fast, and we need to be far away from here when that happens,” Jasper insists, and glares over the top of Lapis’s head at Peridot. “Help me!”

“No, help _me!_ Tell her she’s being brutish! Like usual!”

Peridot’s eyes tick between them. Her tongue darts out, nervously wetting her lips.

“Lapis … “ she begins in a conciliatory tone, and Lapis throws her a look of complete and utter betrayal.

She spreads her hands, palms up.

“Stop, Lapis, please,” she begs softly. “ _Think_ about it. If you go out there to help and something bad happens, they’ll interrogate you. Think of everything you know — if you’ve got even an inkling that the Crystal Gems’ base is the same as those pirates’, you’ve got to keep it _safe._ Okay?”

Lapis draws breath to start yelling, but Peridot cuts her off.

“I’m going to go check the bus schedule,” she says, leaving no room for debate, and whirls around.

Her hair’s feathered in the back, sweaty from dancing, and Lapis watches the back of her head until it disappears around a row of cars at the end of the street. Her own thighs are still trembling from her sprint, her hands balled into fists at her side. She doesn’t think she has the strength to move — _especially_ not back uphill.

Everything in her feels too dense in this moment, blood rushing in every part of her body. She feels like you could look right at her and find every soft, undefended organ, like an anatomical book propped open to a dog-eared page: here is hope, its function vital to human survival. Cut it out, your donor dies.

From behind her, Jasper speaks. Her voice rushes around their ankles like water over rocks. 

“She’s right. You know that, right?”

“She’s Yellow affiliated,” Lapis responds woodenly. “She’s always right.”

A sigh. 

“Come on, Lapis,” Jasper says, in that tone she uses when she thinks she’s being kind, but it just comes out blunt and exasperated. “Just say yes, so we can go.”

The wind drags her hair across her body like a standard, flecking it with soot. At these close quarters, the stench is almost unbearable, charcoal and burnt rubber and _nothing_ like the bonfires they have behind the boys’ cottages sometimes in autumn. Lapis knows the smell’s going to follow her home, that she’ll find it in her hair and her bed for days.

She hikes her shoulders up around her ears and glares out at the water.

_Go._

_No. Stay._

Her stomach swims. She hates the Diamond Authority, _hates_ them so much she can hardly stand it. She hates that they’ve made her world so unfamiliar, a foreign country with no exits, that they can make her sleep in her own room and she still feels so heartbreakingly homesick. She hates the greed that turns donors into corpses, and she’s standing right here being told that there’s nothing she can do about it. But —

But Jasper’s here, within arm’s reach the way she always is, and Lapis can’t lash out at who she wants, so this is the next best thing.

“I can’t,” she bites out. “I’m not a coward like you, I can’t just do _nothing.”_

The blow hits home. Jasper’s eyes shutter.

“They’re just boats, Lapis,” she mutters. “You don’t even know why they’re running.”

“Does it matter?” Lapis asks plaintively. “They want to be free!”

You can’t even see the boats anymore, just the froth left in their wake like papercuts on the sea. Arrowhead trails point south, out of the bay. Lapis feels shook up, like one crack would send her spinning in a hundred directions. A siren lets out a cacophonous wail nearby, and she claps her hands to her ears, overwhelmed.

She squeezes her eyes shut and speaks to the pavement, because that’s easier. 

“How many times,” she says, “do I have to tell you that’s _all_ I want?”

And quieter, scraping a layer of skin off her throat on its way out, the way honesty does when it’s real:

“If … if I don’t help them when they need it, how can I expect anyone to help _me?”_

“I _know_ that,” Jasper’s voice winds tight with frustration, and when Lapis opens her eyes, she finds she has a hard time looking at her face: there’s a lot going on there, that Jasper isn’t thinking to hide. “Why do you think it makes me so mad! They made you _wrong —“_

“Excuse — “

“— but that’s _their_ fault, not _yours,”_ she finishes, with feeling.

And Lapis …

Lapis isn’t sure what to do with that. She opens her mouth, but there’s a sudden bumpiness obstructing the way, something too close to an emotion for comfort, and Lapis’s reaction to those has always been to pretend they aren’t happening until they go away, so she says, “I have to —“ and starts to turn.

Except Jasper lurches forward.

Her hand closes around her bicep, yanking her back around with too much force.

The world turns kaleidoscopic, spinning around them. Rage hits the stove in Lapis’s gut and boils over, and only all her practice at dancing lets her keep her balance; she spins into Jasper’s hands with her teeth bared and her fingernails out, and —

— and — 

— and, years from now, she’ll hope that this moment was witnessed. That someone, _anyone,_ saw them together at the bottom of the stairs and _remembers._ That she isn’t the only one who has to carry this: the burning boathouse crashed inwards with a rush of sparks, the choked-out smoke bruising the sky a stained shade of purple, the sea and the monolithic walls holding the town back from its inevitable downward plunge. The colossal presence of the world, and grander than all of that, somehow: a Jasper bending her proud head to a Lapis Lazuli.

There should be something, a mark on the pavement, a sign mounted on a plinth like the one by the replica Falls at Hailsham:

Here is where it happened.

Here, a woman bent her head and kissed you. 

Here, all the strings in your body pulled taut, tethering you down like a flock of balloons. 

Here, you touched ground at last.

Lapis hangs frozen like that, her teeth slick and hands splayed wide with surprise, her toes barely touching stone. For the space of a second, she thinks about thrusting her arms between them and _shoving._ More yelling would follow, probably (the words “emotional manipulation” are ready and waiting,) and it’s exhausting just to think about.

It’s a fantasy, and it tears to shreds under the reality:

That Lapis can want contradictory things, to be free and to be kept. That she can want to fling herself headlong into the sea and find someplace where she doesn’t feel homesick anymore, and simultaneously want someone to say, “don’t go.”

Here and now, teetering between the two, she knows where she wants to fall.

The decision rises in her like seawater. 

She sways, and swamps under.

Her eyes close, neck tilting back. Jasper’s hand slides from her arm to the back of her head to catch her, and she mouths at her upper lip in the manner of someone who’s not particularly adept at kissing.

Lapis makes a noise.

Then she slots their mouths together more firmly and rolls her tongue against her bottom lip, which has Jasper’s other hand tightening around the small of her back, dragging her up against her hip. Lapis puts a hand in her hair for balance, and then they’re kissing for real, mouths open, crystal for anyone to see.

 

*

 

The bus pulls away from the curb before they’ve even found their seats, knocking them off-kilter. Peridot grabs onto the seatbacks for balance, continuing the rest of the way down the aisle before pulling herself into a window seat. Jasper drops next to her, and Lapis aims for the row behind them, except another burst of acceleration has her missing her handhold.

Jasper catches her, props her upright.

Within arm’s reach, where — where Lapis has grown to expect her to be.

They blink at each other. Lapis can feel each one of those fingers, curled under her elbow. There’s a leak in her somewhere, there’s got to be — there’s no other explanation for how airless she is, suddenly.

 _I don’t think I’ve looked at you before,_ she thinks. _Not properly._

Peridot squints up at them.

“Do you think they got away?” she asks, and Lapis isn’t imagining the way Jasper startles, too.

Peridot kept her voice down, but Lapis casts a furtive look around the bus anyway, letting Jasper draw her in against her knees. It leaves her half-standing, half-propped on Jasper’s body, and Jasper’s eyes are very wide and very dark.

“No,” Lapis says softly. “They didn’t. It’s eerie waters around here.”

 

*

 

They make it back before curfew.

It’s palpable, the way the tension spirals out of Jasper’s body as they swipe their wrists at the door: whatever else happens tonight, here they are, the three of them accounted for.

They stop to say hello to the terriers, who sniff around their ankles in solemn contemplation while they remove scarves and boots, then pass judgment on where they’ve been with cheerful wags of their tails as if to say, _thanks, that was an interesting story!_ Their nails skitter on the floor as they race back out, and Peridot follows, muttering something over her shoulder. Her footsteps hike themselves up the stairs, but Lapis hangs back for a moment, standing in the darkened kitchen.

Behind her, Jasper shifts forward. 

Hesitates.

Lapis wraps her hands around her elbows.

She says, “one of these days, I’m going to clock out of this prison and not even you can keep me here,” worn as smooth and flat as the surface of a mirror from all the times she’s said it. This time, it comes out like a warning: _please don’t get attached._

Audibly, Jasper swallows. Lapis waits, but one beat passes, and then another, and Jasper says nothing.

Then:

Fingertips on the bare skin of her shoulder. 

Every nerve in her body leaps, darting to that point of contact. They trace backward, down the wing of her shoulder blade, and Lapis can feel goosebumps rising in their wake, her skin tightening with sensation the way certain kind of sensitive plants fold up when touched. She scarcely breathes, stares straight ahead.

Jasper’s fingers turn into knuckles, brushed against her ribs, and then her palm, which flattens out across her hip. 

It holds her steady as she steps in flush behind her, pushing their bodies together.

The sudden full-body contact shocks Lapis’s breath right out of her in a shuddering “oh!,” overwhelmed and overloud.

Jasper curves against her back, a similar noise coming out of her crooked, as startling to hear as it had been to make. She slides her hand lower, and Lapis suffers a moment of alarmed indignation when her stance widens seemingly without permission from her brain. She grabs Jasper’s wrist to keep herself steady, the fabric of her skirt bunching against the back of their hands, and darts a look around, wide-eyed; at the magnets on the fridge, the tea kettle and protein blender, all these things that are a facet of their daily lives standing as shadowy witnesses.

But when Jasper decides to fill a space, you make room.

She’s trying to sort out what she’s going to do — turn around, or stay where she is? — when there’s a tug around her throat.

Jasper’s other hand, which Lapis had forgotten about, has the ribbon of her dress tangled in her fingers.

With aching slowness, she pulls it apart.

The ribbons fall loose against her back, and in the next moment, Jasper’s mouth descends on the place where the bow had tied them together. Lapis’s spine arches, her mouth opening soundlessly.

Up against the side of her neck, with a voice burning to cinders, Jasper promises, “I can _make_ you stay.”

 

*

 

Orgasms, Lapis finds, are exhausting, and fulfilling, and — 

And a very pleasing way you keep yourself flush in your own body, for once _aware_ of how many parts are working in concert. 

It’s a symphony, and it leaves her stuck in place, stunned.

She doesn’t sleep cold anymore.

 

*

 

One incident becomes two becomes another, each “next time, what if we …” giving them an excuse to do it again.

She discusses it with Moonstone once, when they accidentally meet each other in the laundry shed at the crack of dawn, piled with dirty underwear and their bedsheets. Following a quick discussion about whites versus colors, they combine their loads and sit together on the low bench that had probably been recycled from some cottage’s TV room, looking at each other with new understanding.

Moonstone, ironically, puts Lapis in mind of moonbeams — longer and paler than anybody she’s ever met, with a black curtain of hair as straight as her nose as straight as her long, tapered fingers.

And she explains that sex takes her out of her body, makes her forget that she’s just temporary, because how can she be so _easy_ to throw away, twenty-one years and then chucked in the bin, when she’s capable of feeling this _much?_ It makes her forget that some day, a dozen other people are going to have all of the beating, fleshy components that keep her alive, and they’re going to go on and make the same mistakes they always have.

“Are you okay?” Lapis asks, because it needs to be asked, too.

They all keep their secrets hidden in Moonstone’s room, and Lapis wonders what’s going to happen if she suddenly needs it back.

“What?” Moonstone says, peeling back strands of her hair from her face and peering at Lapis curiously. “Sleeping with Iron, you mean, or living in a cottage full of boys?”

“How bad does it smell?” Lapis deadpans.

She laughs. “It’s fine. Honestly, it was worse living next to Citrine when we first arrived. She went through that stage where she just didn’t bathe for three weeks at a time — said she didn’t have the motivation. Like, the inside was _their_ business, but the outside was hers to neglect if she wanted, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Lapis says, surprised, remembering how matted Jasper’s hair got, that first winter at the Cottages.

Peridot suggested cutting it off — once. 

Exactly once, and you could have heard a pin drop in that room, as Jasper creaked her head around very slowly and stared her down like an anvil thundercloud, all imminent violence. Lapis isn’t sure if Peridot gets it, but _she_ knows it’s self-consciousness: Jasper keeps her hair long because too many people confuse her for a man, otherwise, and on the list of things sure to trip her very short fuse, that’s near the top. Masculinity isn’t anything people can _assign_ her, but they do it anyway, just by looking at her.

Then Lapis came along and told her, _if you’re going to hang with us, that needs to go,_ and to everyone’s astonishment, the next day Jasper sat down on the carpet in the TV room with a fistful of hairbands and a tiny comb, and got started on untangling the first section.

“It’s not like it is on TV,” Moonstone continues, confusing Lapis for a beat before she remembers. Right, living with boys. “Fuck, have you _seen_ some of those scripts?”

“They’re dumb,” Lapis agrees. “And violent.”

“Right. We didn’t learn anything like that at the kindergartens.” She chews at her thumbnail. “Imagine being a kid on the outside and being told _that’s_ what you’ve got to act like, all aggression with no compromise, just to be called a man.”

A pause, and they grimace in unison.

Silence stretches out comfortably between them, filled only with the groaning of the pipes as the washing machine switches cycles.

Finally, Moonstone says, “It’s not like I live with Iron because I don’t like you, or because I think being part of their group means more than being part of yours, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not,” Lapis assures her. “I just … want to know you’re okay.”

The straight line of Moonstone’s mouth moves.

“The guardian and I have a safe word in case I need to leave the house and not have anyone follow me,” she says. “But — I would hope all guardians have something like that for _any_ donor trying to have a relationship in such close quarters.”

Nodding politely, Lapis glances past her shoulder. Behind her, half-obscured by foamy insulation and cobwebs, a large pink rose stands painted on the wall, and Lapis looks at it and wonders if she should tell her that her guardian _is_ the close-quarters relationship she’s trying to have, and that if she left, Jasper would simply follow. And if … if Jasper tried to leave, Lapis would … honestly, she would drag her back.

For her, it’s the exact opposite:

She’s never felt more _present_ in her own body than she does in bed (or against the wall, or once in the TV room in the middle of the day after everyone else went to see a parade in town, sunlight falling on them warm and lazy and turning Jasper’s frizzy hair a dozen colors at once, the two of them too busy pressing close together to make much more than a half-hearted attempt to drag Lapis’s skirt up her thighs, the corduroy sofa sighing with them in sympathy with every aborted movement,) with Jasper’s fingers between her legs, forked just to either side of where she _needs_ and driving her mad with the need to rock down one way or another. If done right, when she comes she can feel it all the way to her fingertips.

Her body doesn’t feel like a prison, then.

For the first few days, the other girls giggle behind their hands whenever they see them — it’s not like they had a prayer of keeping it to themselves, really.

“Gross!” Citrine complains, slowest on the uptake, and the others laugh. “What did I _tell_ you?”

At Hailsham, the behind-the-hand term for teenagers engaging in homosexual acts with each other was “crystal.”

_Where’s Ruby and Sapphire?_

_Oh, getting crystal out by the Falls, be careful if you’re going down there for anything._

And it was never _wrong,_ whatever Citrine might say (and that probably has more to do with Citrine being allergic to affection in general, rather than Lapis and Jasper in particular,) it was just that they had very limited scripts for everything, and there weren’t any for this: girls who wanted to kiss girls, boys who wanted to kiss boys. Kids who wanted to get crystal with each other were … were making something entirely _new,_ and other kids had been cruel about it in ways that kids often are.

Peridot drags her aside.

“What are you _doing?”_ she hisses, digging her nails into Lapis’s arm. “Of all the — ! She’s terrible — and exhausting to be around, and — and — I _don’t like her.”_

Involuntarily, her voice goes sharp at the end. Lapis bares her teeth back at her soundlessly, darting a furtive look over her shoulder through her open bedroom door, where she can just make out the spread of Jasper’s hair, trailing across her bed.

She swings back to face Peridot, who sets her jaw, unrepentant.

Like she’s said her piece. Like it should be enough.

And Peridot’s been her friend through everything, but Lapis has felt cornered and miserable for — for _years,_ ever since the renegade Pearl at Hailsham, who dragged them into her head and trapped them there. Everyone she looks at now is just a mirror of herself. All of them, wasting time until they’re harvested.

So what does it matter, really, what Peridot thinks?

(A lot, but Lapis is eighteen, and she thinks she has time — to punish _and_ to forgive.)

She licks the back of her teeth, feels bullets, and fires.

“ _You_ just don’t like her because she reminds you of all those kids that bullied you at Hailsham.”

Peridot’s eyes flare wide.

“ _YES,”_ she whispers emphatically. “She does! Doesn’t she remind you of them too?”

But that’s exactly it, Lapis thinks. When someone’s wrong — and Jasper is a lot of things, but she’s _wrong_ about this, that all of them have a single set purpose and they need to stick to it — you can’t just ignore them and hope someone else will take care of them. Sometimes you _have_ to fight.

It’s the Rose Quartz thing to do.

One-by-one, she pries Peridot’s fingers off her arm.

“She is _mine,”_ she says, soft, and Peridot’s face changes like Lapis had taken a brick to it. “She’s mine, and if we’re going to stay here and be miserable, we’ll do it _together.”_

And that’s how the summer passes.

 

*

 

Once, at Hailsham, Peridot picked up an old silver tape recorder at a student swap-meet. 

By common consensus, it was broken, more junky than most of the stuff available to them for swaps, but Peridot pried it open and, showing patience she afforded to few other endeavors, wound back the misbehaving tape. After that, she had a functioning machine, which she used to record everything — her thoughts on classes and the Caretakers who taught them, gossip between the other students (and there has probably never been, before or since, such a comprehensive tally of who was on the outs with who — which Topaz liked which boy from the upper classes and just _who_ did Beryl think she was, taking Chalcedony’s favorite green pen and passing it off as hers like she thought no one would notice?)

Sometimes, too, she used it to record snatches of songs on the radio they had in the Caretaker’s copy room.

That radio was the only exposure they got to music that wasn’t what Caretaker Rebecca had them sing in class, and they coveted every precious stolen second.

One of these was a song about girls who were monsters, and monsters who were girls, and how they thrive once they stop filing back their teeth and claws.

It’s the best kind of love song, Lapis thinks:

The kind that isn’t about how you feel about someone else, but rather about how you feel about yourself.

They used to listen to it repeatedly, winding back the tape recorder again and again, the both of them on their stomachs on Lapis’s bed by the other Blue affiliated, who were a lot more tolerant of such things than Peridot’s people on the Yellow side of the dormitory. She couldn’t get the whole song, so it was the same cut-off section, scratched over again and again, the both of them hungry for every hitch in the music in that all-consuming way you get about music at that age.

Even years later, at the Cottages, she folds her quilt and lays it at the foot of her bed and finds herself humming it, wearing it as weathered as the tracks on the floorboards. It makes her wonder, too — who had this song before her, and who will have it after her?

How far can music travel?

Downstairs, she can hear Jasper shouting with the others — whether in anger or in agreement, she can’t tell, since Jasper uses the same voice for both.

A moment later, footsteps come pounding up the stairs. 

Lapis turns on her heel as Peridot blows by, and catches a glimpse of the incandescent look on her face. Further down the hall, her bedroom door slams open hard enough to reverberate off the wall. Lapis blinks, and pokes her head out to see what the commotion’s about.

Peridot rematerializes.

“ _WOW, THANKS,”_ she bellows, and downstairs, everyone bursts into laughter, loud enough that the terriers start barking, too, just to be included.

“You’re welcome, babe!” Little T calls up.

Fluorite choruses after her, “Thought you might like it!”

Smiling to herself, Lapis shakes her head and goes to finish with the freshly laundered pillowcases. She beats them into shape, and dust and feathery bits of down go everywhere as she tosses left and right back into place by the headboard. She stops, admiring the way the sunlight pouring in catches the swirl of it, and finishes singing herself the refrain. _I am not your soft fur, your traumatic rescued bird. I am the only one who can handle me._

Then she goes to join them.

She meets Jasper on the stairs.

Jasper may sound the same when she’s angry as when she’s happy, her voice so subterranean it should be buried, but the difference, it turns out, is in her face: when she smiles, _really_ smiles, it’s with all her teeth on display, unselfconscious and joyful.

“Did you see what we did?” she’s saying. “Did you —“

The thing about monsters, Lapis thinks, is that they’re always created by wounds — vampires are made from a bite, werewolves from broken flesh. Spilt blood will turn you. Survival leaves you rearranged, fundamentally.

For once, she has the height advantage, stepping into Jasper’s space and forcing her to crane her head back to meet her. 

“— her idea — hey, Lapis, what?”

Lapis cups her chin in her hands. From there, it’s a matter of falling, angling her head and setting her teeth to Jasper’s bottom lip. Jasper sucks in a sharp inhale through her nose, flush against her cheek.

It buzzes to life between them, quick as that: Jasper’s hands seize her under the thighs and lifts her up, hefting them up one step and then another, letting Lapis sling her legs around her waist and settle in. She laces her fingers around the back of Jasper’s neck, using her grip to keep her pressed hard against her front, feeling like something ignited. At the bottom of the stairs, one of the terriers stands there and peers up at them, tail wagging preemptively. It lets out one uncertain bark, then loses interest when they both ignore it. Lapis starts the consent script, piecing it together between kisses, and Jasper tries to bobble a curtsy during the response — jokingly started because the formal language makes it sound like you’re asking someone to ballroom dance — except it bangs them both against the banister.

“Ow!” Lapis yelps, then bursts into laughter.

Jasper readjusts her grip, saying quickly, “You didn’t see that!”

“I didn’t _need_ to see it,” Lapis complains, grinning against her mouth, “I felt it, you big — mmmph!“

They’ve barely gotten to the teeth-licking stage before her back hits her bedspread, and through slitted eyes she sees someone’s foot kick at the quilt she just folded, nearly knocking it off. It hangs valiantly to the side of the bed for a moment, before they shift and it tumbles with a soft _whumph._

 _You’re going to help me refold that,_ she wants to say, but Jasper kisses her and she loses all motivation for anything but this.

They stay there like that, and each moment swirls through them seemingly as slow as dust motes falling, sunlit and suspended as the part of a song you waited to get to.

“Look at me,” she hears herself saying, mumbled up against Jasper’s mouth and chin. “Look at me.”

And Jasper says, “I _am_ looking at you.”

She moves, caging Lapis’s head between her forearms, and it presses them together everywhere.

Lapis reaches for her, with a feeling in her chest too musical, too monstrous for the bones and skin trying to hold it in, but Jasper stops her. She grabs her hand, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the heel of it.

When Lapis’s eyes fly all the way open, Jasper tells her, hoarse, “I’m looking,” and, “you’re an idiot if you think I can see anyone else.”

 

*

 

Later, years from now, when distance has given her better clarity of vision, she’ll be horrified at herself. How could this have become her obsession — how she have ever confused power for love, or the satisfaction of taking their helplessness out on each other for passion? How could she have _liked_ it?

But here and now, she does, and she did, and for a long time, it’s the only thing she wants to feel.

 _You are mine,_ she thinks, tracing an absent-minded pattern along the inside of Jasper’s knee with her fingertip. Satisfaction swells in her stomach, sated and heavy. On the TV, some reckless teenager is about to get eaten by a sea monster. _You are mine, and I’m never letting you go._

 

*

 

As part of her carer training, Peridot spends two weeks at the start of autumn touring the various recovery centers around the country.

She comes back with kitschy gifts for everyone, and bad news.

Lapis thunks her mug down hard on the table. It’s purple, and it says, _I Rode the Teacups at Funland and Had a Marvelous Time!_ in cutesy, curly-que script. Peridot probably got it at a second-hand shop, which she’s okay with because the idea of the recovery centers having, like, a gift shop makes her stomach churn. Citrine tries to tell her the mug is perfect. _You’ve never had a marvelous time in your entire life!_ she points out, and laughs when Lapis glares at her, like, _see?_

“What do you mean,” comes out of her, icy, flat. “Bismuth got caught?”

Peridot smooths out the sheet of bubble-wrap from her luggage, studiously not looking at her, then pops one of the cells in the corner. Then another. Then —

“ _Peridot!”_

“I mean,” Peridot says, reluctantly. “I saw her. At the recovery center.”

The wicker scrapes the floor as Lapis drags her chair out and sinks into it, because she doesn’t think her knees will hold. She stares at Peridot fixedly. 

“They were showing us where they keep early donations.” A soft, trod-upon noise comes out of her, and Peridot flinches, then elaborates, “Donors on probation. The ones who commit crimes and get arrested, but can’t serve a jail sentence, obviously. So if they’re close enough to the right age, they start donations early.”

Lapis sinks back slowly, as if attached to a lead weight.

(Helplessly, she thinks back to the woman who came to their rescue in the cafe, that first time they ever went. She had slid into the other side of the booth, saying with the brute force of a hammer blow, “How about I get ya’ll something to try, just so all the choices don’t seem so overwhelming? And if you like it, fine, then you know what you can order the next time you come in. If you don’t, we’ll figure it out!”

Her face had been instantly recognizable to them, but so impossible that Peridot thinned her eyes and asked, “Who are you?”

“Bismuth!” she’d answered, “as in none of yours,” and laughed. “Sorry, had to get that out there before one of you tried it and I had to pretend it was funny. No need to tell me who you are — we’ve got one Lapis Lazuli, one Jasper, and one Peridot, although I’ve got to say I’ve never seen a Peridot in an XS cut before, you’re _tiny.”_

“Thanks,” said Peridot, in a way that meant the opposite.

Bismuth grinned and leaned back, casually slinging her arms across the back of the booth. Her shoulders were square and built, the kind that would give even Jasper or Little T reason to pause. “Let me guess: you just graduated from the kindergartens and you’re out and about for the first time?”

“Not the _first_ — “ Jasper started, indignant.

“Yes,” said Lapis.

“Thought so. It’s all right. The world is a little overwhelming, but I’m an old hat. How about I teach you some tricks to this place called Earth.”

She’d been a carer for years and years, which is how she came to be sitting in a cafe in a seaside town down the road from a set of Cottages she didn’t live at.

“We go all over,” she said. “Wherever our donors are. There’s a recovery center not far from here, you know, so sometimes I’ll get people asking me to come into town and get them a pastry they’re craving, or the new movie with the cartoon breakfast foods, or a cute boy. Haven’t found that last one, though, they’re hard to find.”

She glanced around, and eyeballed the barista speculatively.

“Yeah,” she decided, sighing. “Nope, still haven’t found one.”

There isn’t a time limit on being a carer — some, like Bismuth, can go for years, but most of the time it only lasts until you’re deemed unfit for one reason or another, and then it’s your turn to be cared for. But here’s what Lapis learned about Bismuth: she wanted to be an architect first. She showed them pictures of the things she built in her one-room apartment, sculptures that make everything Fluorite’s ever done look like tinker toys. It’s one thing for Lapis to know that their existence is unfair, and another to _see_ someone whose potential will be so visibly _wasted_ on donation.

“I want to make something with longevity,” she confessed to them, low. “Or. More longevity than us, anyway. I want to make sure I’m never forgotten.”)

Lapis swallows, weaves her hands around her mug, and asks, “What did she do?”

Peridot hesitates.

Then she says, “Remember the fire? The police boats on the water?”

 

*

 

Pinktree Recovery Center, Dorova, is a large brick complex planted in front of several skyrise office buildings like a footstool, looking as trim and stately as a university Lapis saw once in a library book.

Since the transportation of viable organs from donor to match is still largely a matter of speed over everything else, all recovery centers are required by law to be within fifteen miles of an airfield and to have a functioning helicopter pad at their disposal. While the carer’s car idles at a stoplight, Lapis leans her head against the glass and watches one come in for a landing, blades chopping and lights blinking like a many-eyed sea creature, and wonders if it’s a team about to dispatch vitals somewhere else, or if it’s a match come for their procedure.

“Let me do the talking,” Bismuth’s carer tells them, turning into an underground employee lot and sliding into place alongside several cars as beat-up as her own. The stalls are all marked “CARER.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Peridot. 

Lapis says nothing at all.

It had taken days to convince Peridot that they _had_ to go see Bismuth, and weeks after that for Peridot to get in contact with the carer assigned to Bismuth’s probation case.

And even when that was done and they’d convinced the woman that yes, _yes,_ they were serious, they were told that it’s simply too disruptive to the patients to have visitors from the outside come into a recovery center. Yes, we’re aware that you’re donors, too, but you haven’t started making donations yet and the rules are rules, we’re sorry.

 _There is … one more thing we could try,_ the carer had said after that, and stole a thoughtful sidelong look at Peridot. _You say you’re a carer-in-training?_

The elevator lets them out into the lobby. Bismuth’s carer strides purposefully across to the sign-in desk.

“ — here for Bismuth 22.8, cut L55ds, who will be making a donation today,” she says to the clerk there, sounding exactly like someone who knows the routine too well to be questioned. She continues, brisk, “I have with me two carers-in-training, who will be observing. Do they need to sign anything, or … ?”

Peridot steps up smartly, eager to assist, but Lapis lingers back.

Against the far wall, protected from the sun by the slant of the architecture, an enormous painting hangs at rest. It could easily stretch the whole length of Lapis’s cottage, from one end to the other. It shows a hill of soft, rippling grasses and a spindly acacia tree rising from it, leaves turned rose-colored by the setting sun, and the sight of it leaves her a little breathless. She has no trouble imagining the sensation of the wind in her hair. She guesses this was painted for Pinktree, or maybe Pinktree was named after it.

Keeping one ear tuned to the conversation at the desk, she walks down the length of the painting, then turns around.

There’s a statue in the center of the lobby. She hadn’t paid it any mind at first, since its back was turned towards the elevator banks, but now that she’s facing it, she sees who it is.

It’s Rose Quartz.

The original, she realizes a beat later, approaching slowly. The woman who became the base for the Rose Quartz template. 

Do you think anyone told her, she wonders, standing at the statue’s feet and looking up at that serene, generous face and the welcoming open arms, cast here in bronze. Do you think she ever knew that one of her own clones grew up and turned rebel? 

Her eyes break away and drift towards the information plaque, but she catches herself. 

She doesn’t need to know the original’s name: she’s not important. Not to Lapis, anyway. There’s only one person with that face who matters, and that’s Rose Quartz.

“Lapis!” Peridot waves at her. “Come on!”

Lapis sucks in a startled breath like she’s surfacing from somewhere deep. Right. They’re on a mission.

Bismuth’s carer takes them through several right-angled turns at intersections that quickly begin to look very samesy, spare for the color of the wards. It reminds her of the doctors’ offices at Hailsham, which had been painted a minty shade completely different from the rest of the school, so simply walking in put you in a different mindset. Likewise, each ward here is coded in a different pastel shade, although she couldn’t tell you what the significance of each color was. Finally, the carer lets them into a dark, plain observation room, attached to the operating theater. Considering they told a straight-up lie to get Lapis in here, she’s genuinely surprised when her swipe at the chip reader gets accepted.

 _Don’t try to trick the Authority,_ has been Jasper’s refrain since day one. _They’ll always know!_

Goes to show what _she_ knows.

(Honestly, she’d expected Jasper to put up more of a fight. “No,” she’d said, when Lapis, in her surprise, blurted out, _you’re our guardian, aren’t you going to invite yourself along as escort like you usually do?_ “You need to see it on your own.”)

“Stay here,” the carer tells them. She isn't a gemstone that Lapis recognizes, and Peridot hadn't thought to introduce them. “I need to touch base with Bismuth, but then I’ll be back. I’ve never let anyone go into their donation alone.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Peridot again.

She beeps her wrist on the way out the door, and Lapis looks at Peridot, who looks right back.

“Do you think she’ll remember us?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Lapis says firmly. “She did what I couldn’t. She said she was going to do something, that she was going to be _more,_ and she did. I wanted to say thank you, I wanted …“

“Yeah,” Peridot says quietly, when she can’t finish.

They’re joined by a young man with crisp shoes who’s clearly a medical student, and a slender woman in a wrap-around headscarf who must be something similar, before Bismuth’s carer returns.

“She’ll be in soon,” she says. “I told her she had visitors — it was a good idea, she seemed really cheered by it! This isn’t a one-way mirror, so she’ll be able to see you.”

She’s right: when the assistant surgeons wearing full mask and scrubs roll Bismuth in on a gurney, her head turns immediately towards the window. Her dreads have been pulled back under a cap, her face scrubbed clean, and there isn’t anything that protects her modesty, showing the whole expanse of her silvery blue-black skin, from her neck to the waistband of her pants. Someone’s dotted “cut here” lines in marker.

There’s no recognition in her face that Lapis can see, but maybe there is: whatever she sees in the window makes her smile, soft and fond, and that smile lingers on her lips as everything gets hooked into place.

Then the anesthesiologist counts backwards from ten, and her eyes slide shut.

It’s her second donation, and Lapis isn’t even sure which organ is slated for removal today — that hadn’t been the important part, just that it was the excuse she and Peridot needed to get in here. It’s not supposed to be anything crucial, she doesn’t think. Bismuth’s carer had been talking about the videos she queued up on a tablet for Bismuth when she woke up post-op. “Blacksmithing soothes her,” she’d said, in a politely baffled tone.

There shouldn’t be a reason for concern.

But something about that smile … 

Lapis is pretty sure she knows what’s going to happen before it does.

She wars with that knowledge in silence for several long minutes, not wanting it to be true, but — 

“Oh,” she says, too quiet for anyone else to hear, because it had been love she’d seen on Bismuth’s face. 

Love — and victory, too.

So she’s the only one who doesn’t jump when, forty-five minutes later, the placid heart monitor starts beeping with sudden and increasing urgency, or when the team starts racing — not to remove, but to _save._ She doesn’t look up when, after a harrowing five-minute fight, someone comes into the observation room and says tiredly, “can you come sign the release papers?” and Bismuth’s carer goes, in a faint and shocky voice, “Yes — y-yes, of course.”

Peridot covers her mouth with a shaking hand, but Lapis doesn’t look away, merely balls her hands into fists on top of her knees.

Then —  

The beeping turns into a wail, and the head surgeon says something loud and sharp, gesturing at two of her assistants. One of them replies, and Lapis hears her say, “Total removal, get it prepped, we’ll see what we can salvage,” in the resigned tones of someone who isn’t going to be home in time for curfew.

She stays through it all, past the point the medical student leaves, past the point Peridot goes out into the hall, greenish and pale.

She stays as heart and lungs are slopped out and dropped on ice, carried out at a sprint. There are too many floors between here and the H-pad, but she imagines she can hear the helicopter blades whirring up, with three vital cases strapped into place, or maybe already gone, spirited off to someone who didn’t expect to live today.

She stays until blood stops dripping into the drain under the table, until the surgeon pulls her mask down and sighs, until every last person leaves.

Nobody covers Bismuth before they go, and that image will stay with Lapis for the rest of her life, carried around like a crack in the center of her back that she’ll feel every time she tries to breathe too deeply: that empty body — the one that had once boomed laughter, brought them coffee, dyed her hair, drove around the country and joked about her name — everything she ever did … 

And they just left her, discarded on a table.

Finally, she draws in a sudden, shuddering inhale, feeling horrifically raw and new —

And realizes she isn’t alone.

The woman’s still there, the one she assumed was another student.

But as she turns, she gets a look at her face: the long, pointed nose and the keen eyes, the iridescently clear skin, surprisingly unchanged by the passage of time. Her heavy coat wasn’t for the sterile cold of the room; it’s a disguise, same as the scarf that covers her distinctive hair.

All Lapis’s breath leaves her at once.

“Oh,” she says, stunned. “It was you. She was smiling at _you.”_

The renegade Pearl shoots to her feet.

She’s out the door before Lapis’s brain can even think about sending the signal to her legs and feet to follow.

“Wait!” she calls, uselessly, slamming out into the hallway after her.

There! Already at the end of the hall and rounding the corner, walking fast.

“Caretaker Earl!” she shouts, ignoring Peridot’s surprised, _Lapis?,_ as she blows past. “Please, _wait!”_

But it’s too late. She’s gone.

 

*

 

The sky hangs low out at sea, turned the same oft-washed grey as laundry, and Jasper and Peridot stay standing on the pier as Lapis goes down to the rocky shore, sneakers slipping over the wet stones that rattle and give way underfoot until she reaches the hard, compacted sand exposed by low tide. When she looks back, she sees the scaffolding rising behind them, all the burnt skeletal remains of the boathouse knocked out and removed.

The wind is brisk and astonishingly cold. She’d knocked her knuckles against the railing coming down, and the pain stays magnified long beyond what she thinks is reasonable.

Above, Jasper and Peridot watch her pace back and forth along the shore, sand sucking at her shoes until the next wave comes in, swamping them.

“She needs to take better care of those,” Peridot says grumpily to no one in particular.

Jasper grunts back, but she’s thinking along the same lines: they’ll have to soak them to get the sea brine out and then run them through the dryer, and hope for the best.

“Unless she _wants_ to go barefoot everywhere.” Peridot tilts her head back to watch the gulls kite along overhead, wings held stationary against the wind. It can’t be that late yet, but the sky’s so oppressively heavy today that the streetlights in town have already gone on, smearing blotches of yellow up and down the heights.

Jasper shoves her hands into her pockets.

“What would you even do?” she asks gruffly. “If you got away?”

Peridot looks back at her, then out to sea, then to Lapis — a very still figure in front of the waves.

“Live, I suppose,” she answers. “What I’m doing now, but _more.”_

“Okay,” says Jasper, and then, “oh, fuck,” and they both start moving quickly, because Lapis is wading out to sea.

Water sloshes up to her waist, and then higher with sudden glee. The horizon is a distant, impossible sight, like the thin side of a coin, flat as a gurney, and Lapis closes her eyes and opens her mouth and _wails._

She wails for Bismuth, and the Tourmalines, and Ruby and Sapphire who’d been Blue affiliates before her and kissed each other behind the Falls, and Peridot and Jasper who don’t know they’re dead yet — how can Lapis let that happen to them? But how can she _stop_ it?

The current drags at her.

Her hands ball into fists at her temples, head bent back. 

“Let me out!” comes howling out of her. “Let me out, _let me out, LET ME OUT.”_

Splashing, behind her.

An arm hooks around her waist just as she loses her footing, water closing over her head in a rush, and it yanks her backwards.

She surfaces, choking, hands scrabbling for purchase. Her body, unbidden, relaxes into Jasper’s hold, betraying her in familiar territory.

She coughs and spits brine, and starts thrashing.

“Let me go!” Her voice is hinged in two, broken clean down the middle. “Please, _let me go!”_

“I can’t,” says Jasper, gasped against the back of her head, and there’s a note in her voice that Lapis has never heard before. “I _can’t,_ Lapis. Never.”

Lapis screams. She kicks, but the effect’s muted by water resistance, and all it does is unbalance them. She sends them both plunging under, but Jasper finds her footing first and they come up again, soaking wet and gasping. Lapis’s fists pummel her head, her shoulders, striking hard enough to leave marks, and two days from now they’ll be the color of rotten fruit, but Jasper ducks her head and doesn’t slow down. Step by step, she hauls them back to Peridot, waiting on the shore.

A towboat trundles by as this happens, branded with some sightseeing company’s logo. 

Inane music pipes from its speakers. There are people on the deck, and _they_ can go wherever they want. Their curious oval faces turn in their direction, heedless of the border between their two countries, their two states of existence — the distance between which is insurmountable, untraversable.

 

*

 

**Hailsham**  
**Year 15, Diamond Standard**

 

“Long before you or I or many of us were born,” says Caretaker Earl. “We were at war.”

The last snows of Ventis have come and gone, and with it Floris brought the first puff of warm air and sunshine, so even though it was still too chilly outside to merit it, they’d cracked the windows open — as far as safety glass would allow, of course. The wind stirs the papers on the desk, the notices pinned to the corkboard; fire safety procedure, scheduled teacher planning days, contact information for the current heads of Affiliation. Nobody else moves.

Caretaker Earl stands with her back to them, her shoulders hiked so that the blades of them are visible, prominent through her sleeveless blouse.

Her voice is still and untouched, plumbed from somewhere so deep that none of them think about moving their pencils to take notes. Instinctively, they know that this isn’t teaching. There won’t be any Pearl Points awarded for this.

“To this day, I don’t think anybody has a grasp on _why._ Why did we go to war? We just were, and somebody _else_ had the reason, but surely it had to be a _good_ reason if we were sacrificing so much to it, right?” A pause, and her head turns to track the progress of something outside the window, showing them her profile; the strong forehead and very long nose. “In my experience, the reasons become excuses, and no excuse justifies the cost.

“We lost a whole generation to it. Our most stalwart hearts lost on the battlefield, our beloved stars left at home to weep, our greatest minds ground up to see what new horror we could create that might be enough to stop this, and no leader ever _quite_ good enough to finish it.”

She traces diamond shapes in the air with her fingertips; Pink and Blue, Yellow and White.

Somewhere in the hall, the nurse’s cart rattles. It carries everyone’s daily pill bottles back to the infirmary to be refilled.

Inside the classroom, you can hear a pin drop.

“At first,” Caretaker Earl drops her hand to the windowsill. “Our leaders went to the Diamonds and proposed that they clone them — our generals and engineers, our best soldiers — but almost immediately, you could tell it wasn’t going to work. It takes longer than seventeen years maturation to grow a war hero, and you can’t clone experience.

“So the Diamonds said, if it’s too expensive to recreate the experience, how do we keep from losing that experience in the first place? What’s killing them? Disease and old age, vital organs shredded in combat. If we could just replace _those,_ then we could keep the person. You could almost double their life-span.”

She draws her hand back to her chest.

“The war ended,” she says, soft. “The economy boomed. All over the country, kindergartens were built in order to meet the demand. What had originally been available to only a few could now, thanks to the Diamonds, be purchased by anyone, and the transplant waiting list grew and grew every day. And then — fifteen years ago, which — oh, goodness, that would have been a full two years before you were even _born,_ how did that happen? Don’t be silly, I can’t be that old — oh wait, yes I can. Fifteen years ago, a rebellion kicked off. Do you want to know what it was about?”

A pause.

Lapis sees movement in her peripheral vision, but it’s just Larimar at the next desk over, shooting her a baffled look. Are they supposed to answer?

“You,” says Caretaker Earl.

And then she turns around.

“You will never grow old.” Her voice comes out stronger now, aching with sympathy. “You will never have careers. You will never have homes or families. You will never get to do the things everyone else is prolonging their lives to do. You will live here for seventeen years, and then you will live elsewhere for four, and I’m — I’m _sorry,_ I’m so sorry that’s all we could get you, we tried _so hard —”_ she shudders, and collects herself with visible effort. “And then you will start donating your internal organs. You will do this until there are none left.”

Stepping away from the window, she comes to stand in front of her desk. She’s the newest of the Caretakers, and they’re only a couple months into the Standard year, so she takes a moment to decide what to do with her feet. She settles them into ballet position.

She looks right at them and says, “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry, from the bottom of my heart, that we couldn’t save you.”

For a long time, nobody moves. And for a long time after that, nobody moves. None of the usual classroom sounds are happening — no squirming, no scratching, no coughing or sniffling. The room is full of bodies, and they remain completely still. Like if nobody budged, then the truth won’t find them.

The wind comes in, tosses the top sheets of paper off Caretaker Earl’s desk. They scatter to the floor.

A beat.

Then Agate slides sideways out of her seat, coming around her desk to gather them up. She shuffles them together and puts them back. She does this without jostling Caretaker Earl, whose head is bowed, whose hand shades her face, but not so well that they can’t see the tears pearling at the end of her jaw, before they fall.

 

*

 

Lapis lays awake that night in the Blue corner of the dormitories, blanket pulled up to her clenched jaw and the window by her head cracked enough to let the sound in: the electric fence humming, the owls warbling in protest at the dropping temperature. They don’t have teeth to chatter like she does. She never hears a car drive up to the gates, but she guesses it must have — either way, the next morning the classroom is empty.

At assembly, Caretaker Rebecca wipes down her glasses and says, “I am sorry to inform you that Caretaker Earl is no longer with us.”

And that’s how they know it’s true.

 

*

 

She closes the window the next night, and the night after that borrows a blanket from Beryl three beds down who says she never needs one, but it doesn’t matter. Lapis clenches her teeth and shivers herself to sleep, again and again, until it becomes the new normal, until a stone permanently knots itself into the center of her back. And maybe it's all in her head, how she can be fine all day and then when she lies down to sleep, it’s like her own death comes to stand over her, turning her corpse cold.

(She wakes, once, years later, because Jasper’s grumbling at her.

“— stop _squirming,_ you — brat, find a position and stick with it.”

And Lapis’s mouth goes off without any input from her groggy brain. “Wow, that’s cutting. Name-calling. I’m hurt.”

“ _Lapis.”_

She feels her name more than hears it, the vibration of each syllable; she’s got her face tucked into Jasper’s throat, the underside of her chin, and her own neck stabs at her painfully when she pushes herself up onto her elbows. She sees immediately what the problem is.

“I’m lying on your hair.”

“Trust me,” Jasper’s voice is a dry scrape. “I know.”

“Well, it’s _itchy!_ Can we tie it back?”

And it’s only when they shove the covers away, climbing out, that Lapis realizes why she’d been so deeply asleep:

She hadn’t been shivering.)

 

*

 

Lapis doesn’t know who did it, whether it was somebody who’d been in Caretaker Earl’s class that day or another student, jolted into action once the news had spread to every corner of the school, but somebody finds some untouched school records, the edges of them curdled with twenty years of yellowing, and in it — 

“She was a Pearl,” Chalcedony flips the clipping over. 

They crowd in close, Peridot already saying, “no _way,”_ even though their eyes are drawn to her unerringly: the hair’s a different color and her face is more rounded, but there’s no mistaking that nose. 

Lapis folds her arms. “She doesn’t look like a Pearl.”

“She doesn’t look like _our_ Pearls,” Chalcedony shoves her frizzy brown hair behind her ear, one-handedly adjusting a pink hair barrette to hold it there as she does; it’s a habitual tic with her, that she does when she’s winding up to something exciting. “But sometimes templates go out of fashion — remember when Caretaker Ian called you an Era 2 Peridot?”

Peridot’s eyes go sharp. “I guess.”

So all of the Pearls currently at Hailsham must have been cloned from someone else, someone with more agreeable qualities. Do you think that happened right after _this_ Pearl —

Lapis persists, “She’s been here for months. None of the staff _noticed?”_

Chalcedony widens her eyes and shrugs, like _I don’t know._ Maybe Caretaker Earl did a really good job dyeing her hair, or maybe it was simply unthinkable that a runaway Pearl would return to Hailsham and pose as a caretaker because — well, who knows why? 

(Or maybe the reason nobody recognized her was because nobody knew what her face would look like past the age of twenty-five.)

Lapis steals another look, sees a young woman in a Hailsham uniform surrounded by her class. So many of the faces are the same (and later, she’ll strain her memory, trying to recall if she saw Rose Quartz’s distinctive hair among the rest, but she must have — it’s impossible to form that kind of bond with someone you didn’t go to kindergarten with, right?) that time makes no sense, and she could be looking at anyone.

“You have to hide that,” she says flatly. “They can’t know that we know.”

Chalcedony’s already slipping the clipping back inside her pinafore, directly underneath her yellow diamond-shaped patch, and not a moment too soon: a loud burst of laughter preempts someone’s arrival, but as two tangled figures stumble around the back of the Falls, they stop short and say, “oops!” Lapis levels them with her best reptilian look, and they decide to seek privacy elsewhere.

Following them with her eyes, Chalcedony frowns, like she doesn’t get it.

Peridot, however, does.

“That she used to be a student here?” And then her eyebrows spring apart. “No, we’re not supposed to know that she _escaped.”_

 

*

 

One week after that, a bunch of boys from an upper class corner Peridot as she’s sneaking out of the girl’s bathroom with a book under her arm.

“Hey, lads,” goes the boy in front — later, when she’s making the report, the guardians will ask her who this “instigator” was, and Peridot just blinks and asks them why it matters. In her experience, boys never do anything worthwhile unless they can do it in packs. They all contributed. They’re all guilty. They learned something new and chose to handle it badly. 

A body blocks her way, and she looks up at a set of leering teeth just as he says, “Why don’t we donate this one’s _brain_ first?”

“Hey, _yeah,”_ agrees another, advancing.

“Maybe it will fix her!”

The resulting scar makes an interesting triangular indent out of her forehead. 

(To Peridot’s bemusement, Lapis will develop a habit of reaching over and rubbing it smooth with her thumb when she’s lost in thought.)

“This is why the children should not be _told_ about harvesting until they’ve reached maturation!” the nurse mutters vehemently, removing the tape and gauze with a deft tug, so fast Peridot doesn’t have time to flinch. “This could have been avoided.”

“No, ma’am, I’m better off knowing —” Peridot tries.

The nurse just _tsks_ and pats her arm. “I’m sure it seems that way, but trust me, it’s not.”

During labs that same day, Lapis chews on the end of her pencil until the metal base to the eraser dents, and then she sets it down.

“What?” Peridot goes, without looking up from her screen.

Lapis is still turning it over in her head, the same way they’re supposed to be turning over rocks to identify which one is the igneous one. (This is honestly new information to Lapis, that there are different _types_ of rocks beyond what occurs naturally in the picnic area behind Hailsham, that the volcanos in textbooks are made of something else entirely.)

Here is a fact:

The fences are electrified. If you try to escape, you die. If you succeed in escaping, they’ll hunt you down and you’ll die. There is nowhere to go but a recovery ward, there is no other course for your life but donation, then donation, then donation, until you’ve donated so much you aren’t viable anymore. Then you die.

And even if Lapis looked out the classroom window, past the fence … she doesn’t know the first thing about how to survive out there. That would kill her, too.

But the renegade Pearl —

She told them the truth, yes, but more than that, she _showed_ them. She walked back into Hailsham fully-fledged, _alive._ Not only could it be done, but you could escape _and_ have a life. You didn’t have to always live in hiding, terrified of being caught, terrified that any day you’ll turn around and walk straight into 10,000 volts. You didn’t have to accept your fate.

You could be _free._

“Why do we have to do it?” she hisses.

“Because it will be on the test?” Peridot blinks, and then says, “Oh, you were talking about —“

“Why _can’t_ we be something else?” She flings her mind out, trying to find the most outrageous thing she can think of. “Carpenters or something! Rock science guys!”

“Geologists.”

“Whatever! What if we — we didn’t donate?” And, very softly, “I don’t want to donate, Peridot.”

Peridot looks right back at her. The gouge in the center of her forehead is healing, flushed faintly red. For the rest of her life, that scar is the first place people’s eyes will go when they meet her.

“That’s called theft, Lapis,” she says, in the tone of someone who looked it up.

 

*

 

**Strawberry Fields Recovery Center, Delmarva**  
**Year 23, Diamond Standard**

 

A perfunctory series of doctor’s visits and one executive decision tossed dispassionately over one white-clad shoulder makes a Guillotine Day out of an otherwise fine autumn afternoon, and Jasper swallows hard and looks away from the expanded screen, out the window until the doctor says, “Carer, get verification from your donor, will you?” and Peridot says, “Jasper.”

“Yeah,” scrapes off the hot tarmac in her throat; messy, awful. “I heard.”

Peridot returns her to her ward afterward, touches her elbow, and says, “I’ll be back, all right? I need to —“

“— get on the road. Who’s got a donation tomorrow?”

“I — another Peridot. She —“

“Oh. That makes her a sister. Go. Be with her. I’ll see you in a few days, or — or whenever.” 

Peridot’s mouth makes a worried crimp, and it stirs Jasper back to something resembling herself. 

She draws herself up and brings her knuckles to meet the palm of the opposite hand. “Tell her if she doesn’t pull through with flying colors, I’ll pay her a visit and make her regret making you sad.”

“Don’t be creepy,” says Peridot in aggravation, but the lines around her eyes ease.

Inside, Jasper swipes her wrist at the chip reader. She turns towards her curtains, her nightstand, the painting still drying where she left it. Then she lets her face fall, and whatever expression takes its place makes Obsidian — who took Bloodstone’s bed — lift her eyebrows and go, “ _Woah._ You okay?”

“Guillotined,” is all Jasper has to say.

“Oh, shit,” comes the response, sympathetic. “When? What organ? Do you know?”

She shakes her head. “Depends on a match.”

Much later, after she’s rinsed out her paintbrushes and brushed her teeth (taking care not to get the utensils involved in these tasks mixed up,) she returns to her cot and notices, for the first time, that something’s out of place. A blocky silver _something_ sits on her nightstand, left among her treasures — although, hang on, is that a _tape recorder?_

She sets her paintbrushes down by her radio and reaches for it. She hasn’t seen a tape recorder since her kindergarten days.

When she presses the playback button, frowning, there’s a scratch — 

And then Peridot’s voice. 

“Log date.”

 _Ah,_ Jasper thinks, looking down. She must have forgotten it in her hurry. 

It’s an old machine, the paint dinged off the corners and the threads coming out of the duct tape that holds its wrist strap together. If the wear is any indication, Peridot must have _heaps_ of tapes, or … does she just keep rewriting this one?

Either way, this is probably one of her treasures. She’ll be back for it.

Jasper sets it down and goes to bed.

She dreams.

In her dream, Lapis slings a leg across her waist and straddles her with the ease of familiarity, like she never left. She’s in that outfit with all the ribbons, the skirt that she used to wear dancing, and Jasper wants her even like this. There’s not enough surgical mesh in the world to make her unaware of this vital thing, removed.

But when she reaches for her, the dream grabs her hands first and pushes them away, pinning them above her head.

“Stay,” she murmurs.

“Lapis —“ says Jasper, restlessly shifting her heels. The quilt bunches.

But she’s leveled with a look and quells the urge. Lapis shows teeth, a quick gleam in the bedroom dark.

“Still want to keep me?” she asks, low, suboceanic, and Jasper feels it all the way through to the other side of her, like a wound, like the bleak violence of a charcoal stroke, like a rumor: _don’t you know that if you’re in love and you can prove it, they’ll let you delay your donations?_

_So maybe, maybe I could even learn to love like you._

“No,” she confesses, in the same kind of voice, buried fathoms down in the dark. “No, I want you free. I want you to stay.”

Lapis frowns.

“That makes no sense,” she points out, and why shouldn’t she? The Jasper she knew at the Cottages was a guardian, all swagger lidding a boiling pot of desperation and imploding self-worth. She never met the Jasper made weak by her donations, the one who today was told she was clear for her next one. Lapis is long gone, and Jasper won’t get the chance to explain any of this to her, that “free” doesn’t mean “far away from me.”

Like all honesty when it’s _real,_ when it’s _true,_ it hurts coming out:

“I want you to be free to choose. I want you to choose to stay with me.”

Lapis sits back on her heels. She opens her mouth to say something, but doesn’t.

This is a dream, after all, and a Lapis who _wants_ to stay with her isn’t even something her subconsciousness can convincingly create.

She wakes, and the first thing she sees is the edge of the tape recorder, sitting on her bedside table in front of the radio.

And Jasper doesn’t _intend_ to listen, but she’s — 

Well, she’s not proud of it, but she got guillotined yesterday and she’s aching for _something,_ and it strikes her with a sudden, furious hope that Peridot has a recording of Lapis’s voice on here. As keepsake.

That morning, she goes out onto the balcony off the rec room and picks a chair far away from the donors trying to sneak extra portions of breakfast out from under the dietician’s watchful eye. They’ll close this area off soon enough, as Mortalis begins and the weather turns over like a body in a grave, and Jasper can see the places where the morning sun hasn’t yet blushed the frost away. Down in the lot, the wind stirs the stiffening leaves.

She hits Play.

_Click._

“Log date — “

A lot of this Peridot must have recorded while driving. She can hear traffic noises sometimes, windshield wipers thunking industrially at the rain, or Peridot’s voice cutting off mid-sentence to bellow something like, “use your _damn_ indicator, for the love of — _who raised you!”_ That makes sense; so much of a carer’s life is shuttling back and forth across the country, visiting donors until you don’t anymore.

Most of it is Peridot’s observations: on the surrounding countryside; on the cities; on the people who live their lives unaware of the blessing that is a _full_ life; on kindergartens, Cottages, and recovery centers; on interesting facts that she learned, like, did you know that different kinds of trees grow in different parts of the world. Imagine that! There are trees we’ve never seen! There are people who’ve never seen the trees we see!

Sometimes other voices make their contributions. 

They aren’t anybody that Jasper recognizes, so these must be her other donors.

_Click._

“— oh, right now? Okay? Well. At my kindergarten, we didn’t have classes. They didn’t … really call us anything, I guess. If they had to, usually we were just called ‘the cluster.’ _When will the cluster be ready?_ And such.”

_Click._

“The rebellion was fought over us. I mean, grain of salt, I was six when it happened — you all look so _little_ to me! You know, that’s probably the real reason I stopped being a carer and started donating, you all just started looking too young. You could tell I was going to be White affiliated early on — did I tell you how many times I almost got caught listening at the headmaster’s keyhole? Sorry, what? _Oh!_ The rebellion. Lost, of course. All those people out there are too attached to their generations. Mothers, grandmothers, children — I mean, we don’t have those, so we can’t compare, but I’m told that they’re _super_ important in the outside world. You can’t tell those people that the science to save their loved ones exists, but they can’t have it because the science wants to live its own life. So yeah. It’s not in _their_ interest to think of us as people. The Donor Program continues.”

_Click._

There are parts she can’t listen to. She fast-forwards through the warble of Peridot confessing how unimpressed she is with sex but how often she finds herself developing crushes, and how she doesn’t have a script for that. It wasn’t meant for anybody else’s ears.

And it winds up not really mattering, since if Peridot kept Lapis’s voice on recording then it isn’t on this tape, but she listens through to the end anyway.

She’s always known Peridot was smart, but Peridot when she’s not self-conscious is a whole different _kind_ of smart.

_Click._

“They’ll find something better than us. They have to. The Donor Program is expensive, and expensive doesn’t remain sustainable forever.” A bag crinkles, and her next sentence comes out crunched between bites. “Maybe they’ll — find a way to take a customer’s genetic material and grow replica organs in a lab setting — thus eliminating the need for a host to grow them! Maybe that could end this.”

_Click._

A different time, a different note of exhaustion in Peridot’s voice:

“But you know what the next step in delaying death will probably be? What — ? No, not you, I wasn’t talking to — I don’t even _know_ you.

“Where was I? Oh. Brain transplant. They haven’t managed those yet, not successfully. Damage, deterioration, disease — you can buy all the organs you want, but it won’t matter if your brain gives out and you don’t even remember _why_ you’re enjoying whatever it is you killed a donor to enjoy.

“But that’s what Yellow affiliates are for, isn’t it? Blah, blah, ingenuity, experimentation, here’s what it really means: White keeps others in line, Pink’s got the best meat, Blue will say ‘thank you’ as they die, but Yellow becomes a guinea pig for whatever the Diamonds want to try next, and someday they’ll crack the brain transplant problem. Then all the rich will have to do is pay to have a clone of themselves grown, and when the time is right — “

Loudly, she imitates a zipper unzipping.

“— _bbrrrrt,_ dump the clone’s brain, insert your own, and hey! Ta-da! Congratulations on your brand new, youthful regeneration! … sucks to be the clone, though, I guess. Well. Whatever. Sucks to be us now.”

_Click._

A pause.

A buzz, low in the background. Air conditioner?

Then:

“I want to apply. For the deferral.” 

Jasper’s eyes snap open. She sits up. 

The hunger in Peridot’s voice drops into her like a penny into a well; Jasper hears it rattle and clatter on stones, echoing all the way through the hollow insides of her.

“I’ve thought about it. I’ve figured it out. It’s Caretaker Rebecca. It has to be. _That’s_ who you go to. If anybody, she ought to know what love looks like, right? It can’t be anyone in the Authority, they don’t care. Diamonds have been hardened for too long to have any feelings left, it’s got to be someone who can undermine them, it’s got to —“

_Click._

“I know I’ve already delayed my donations by becoming a carer. That’s one kind of deferral, I guess. But that just means I’ve had more time to prove —“

_Click._

“— oh, who am I kidding. If they don’t save geniuses like Bismuth, what chance do I have?

“A Peridot. Era 2. Extra small.”

_Click._

“You know that feeling you get in your chest when you see bubbles, or bow ties on little green aliens, or an empty power outlet the moment you need one — or, or! Or rain through a window, or … or two people hugging when they haven’t seen each other in a long time, like — like you’re just so _glad_ that you exist on the same planet at the same time as something so perfect?”

There’s a long pause, and Jasper tilts her head, straining to distinguish the faint background noises; there, that’s the clinking of ceramic dishware. The faint murmur of voices, and the grinding whir of a machine.

Oh. A cafe.

She has no trouble picturing it: Peridot sitting at a table, with an order that she’s confident she likes in front of her, snatching this experience straight from the jaws of whoever says she can’t have it. Maybe she’s on the lookout — donors fresh from the kindergartens, venturing out for the first time and terrified of all their choices. Jasper wonders if she still toasts Bismuth, even without Jasper and Lapis there to toast with.

Then Peridot speaks.

“I love everything too much not to _try.”_

 

*

 

**The Cottages**  
**Year 21, Diamond Standard**

 

In Lapis’s experience, if someone is truly determined to find you, there isn’t anywhere in the Cottages that you can go that’s private enough.

The laundry shed comes closest. In the summer, the humidity from the dryers turns the whole room into a damp swamp, making it unpleasant to stay there for any length of time. When the weather grows cold, though, it becomes almost cozy. Lapis finds herself here a lot, camped on the loveseat in front of the rose mural, reading and listening to the washing machine click through its cycles, grateful to be away from barking dogs and noisy housemates.

Today, she has too much trouble concentrating, even without the distractions. The travel pamphlets she picked up the last time they went dancing sit untouched in her lap.

She shifts on her perch on top of the dryer, directly across from the rose on the wall. It’s sorely faded, and thanks to Jasper, she knows enough about painting now to guess that’s because nobody bothered to put down a coat of primer before they started. It must have been a spontaneous decision. Do you think that counts as graffiti?

She can’t believe she’s never noticed it before, but the rosette pattern is made up of dozens of interlocking diamonds in various sizes. 

All of them, of course, are pink.

She knows it’s impossible that Rose Quartz herself painted it, but she likes to think it could have been.

The door opens, catching on the uneven pavement outside with a grinding noise and letting light spill into the tiny shed, and Lapis looks up, shielding her eyes hopefully.

But it’s just Jasper.

“Here you are,” she says by way of greeting, ducking under the doorframe and tracking in crushed-up autumn leaves. She’s got a clipboard in her hands. “Come on. You’ve got to help plan meals. The new donors are going to arrive any time in the next week, depending on buses, so Little T wants us cooking and demonstrating.”

The whole time she’s talking, she looks at the laundry schedule, the bench with its weathered cushion sagging at one end, the washing machine door —

Anywhere but at Lapis.

A long silence follows. Pointedly, Lapis keeps staring straight ahead, and Jasper sighs. She sets the clipboard down on top of the dryer by Lapis’s skirt, freeing both hands to quickly comb through her hair. The wind must have picked up since lunch, because this unearths several tangles and a twig. A furtive sidelong glance at the clipboard shows Lapis a color-coded spreadsheet, everyone’s different handwriting filling in the squares. 

“Lapis,” says Jasper impatiently, when this stalemate shows signs of continuing indefinitely. “What’s wrong?”

It flies right out of her, accusing: “You _let them go.”_

“Ah,” says Jasper, low. She steps away, turns, and sinks onto the bench, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees. By this point, Lapis can recognize Jasper in seven different shades of angry, but this — this is what Jasper looks like, guilty.

She glares at the top of her head.

“ _Look_ at me,” she commands, and Jasper does.

“They’ll be back,” she blurts out, before Lapis can say anything else. “If they didn’t at least _try,_ they were going to do something stupid.”

Lapis nods. 

“Iron got his notice,” she says, certain of this now.

“For him and Moonstone, it was now or never,” Jasper says, with absolutely no inflection. “They’ll head back to Homeworld. And they’ll apply for a deferral on their donations because they’re in love.”

Understanding bolts through Lapis, and her spine snaps straight, heels thumping against the side of the dryer.

“And you let them go,” she says, this time in a completely different voice.

Jasper’s eyes crack into hers.

“Someone should,” comes out of her, rough as a challenge. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to them now, where they’ll go if their application fails — or where they’ll go if it succeeds. I just know that someone should have the chance.”

 _I don’t get you,_ Lapis thinks. _You don’t want me to avoid donation by leaving, but it’s fine if Moonstone and Iron do it?_

She opens her mouth and says, soft and horrible and cruel, “There are no deferrals, Jasper.”

Jasper’s eyes go very bright.

“I guess we’ll see,” she says, keeping her voice as blunt and flat as a shovel. “If they come back and claim their room.”

“Or maybe,” Lapis replies, unable to stop herself. “The Authority will click their tongues and say, ‘ _oh,_ those poor deluded dears,’ and take pity, and let Moonstone start donating early so that they can stay together. Maybe we’ll get _three_ new donors this year instead of just two.”

She leans forward, and Jasper stares back at her, visibly stung.

“Why are you _acting_ like this,” she demands crossly. “I thought you’d be happy to see people get out of here!”

“Not to a dead end!” Lapis flashes back. “She’s my _friend,_ and —“

_And I didn’t get to say good-bye._

The pamphlets crumple in her fist, and she wrenches away, folding her arms across her chest and hunching down like she can put her back up against that wall of hurt, like if she doesn’t look at that thought then it can’t harm her.

There’s a beat of silence from the bench, and then Jasper says, “Lapis, come here.”

“No.”

“Lapis — “

“You shut _up,”_ and she slides to the ground, already reaching.

Jasper doesn’t hesitate. Her hands go around Lapis’s waist, slide up her back, and she bends her against the shape of her body. Holding her close, she buries her face in Lapis’s neck, and Lapis lashes her arms around her neck and hugs back, just as fierce. The washing machine chugs diligently in the background, and if Lapis keeps her eyes squeezed shut, she doesn’t have to remember the hours she and Moonstone spent together on this bench, gossiping about the weirdest things a partner’s ever done to them, thinking it was sexy. Once Lapis realized sex was something you could laugh about, it became a lot more fun — she and Jasper wouldn’t have lasted as long as they have, without that. You can’t digest anger, but that feeling you get when you’re laughing, like you’re bigger and more powerful than your bones? That’s worth keeping, and Moonstone made it seem so easy.

Up against her throat, Jasper’s mouth moves, and Lapis pulls back far enough to hear her murmur, in a tone stripped raw to the bone:

“— don’t let me go.”

And here’s the flip side of it.

Lapis feels it like being dragged through a bramble patch, a dozen tiny scratches opening on her heart.

 _Oh, Jasper,_ she thinks, with sudden stunning sympathy, because for someone who sure does love sticking her nose in other people’s business, Jasper still has no idea what space she occupies in Lapis’s life: prism-shaped, a single focal point through which Lapis can attack a whole spectrum of people. All of her fury and frustration at everything she cannot control, channeled into the first person who got in her way.

So to Lapis, Jasper might as well not be there at all, but Jasper’s the opposite. Lapis takes up nearly every color in her world; Lapis is all she sees.

 _I’m going to have to deal with that,_ Lapis thinks, with a sinking in her stomach. _But not now._

She turns her head, seeking, and Jasper’s neck bends to meet her.

Her mouth opens, and she kisses back with the kind of desperation that only uncertainty and self-doubt can bring. Lapis fists her hands in the collar of Jasper’s button-down shirt and holds on, mouths bruising against each other like fruit.

A moment later, Jasper’s hands slide under her thighs and she stands, the muscles in her shoulders bunching as she effortlessly hauls Lapis up with her. She sets her back on top of the dryer, and distantly, Lapis is aware of somebody bumping the clipboard with the color-coded graph, knocking it to the cement with a loud clatter. 

“Oops,” she mumbles.

“You only know like four meals anyway,” Jasper tells her, almost laughing. “I’ll fill it out for you.”

“Whose idea was it to let me teach the fresh faces anyway?” Lapis wants to know — kids, she thinks of them, like there’s some unfathomable distance between seventeen and nineteen. “I’ll just give them bad habits.”

“I know.”

She hooks one leg over Jasper’s hip and drags her in. With fumbling hands, she pulls up her shirt and the fitted black tank underneath so she can put her palm flat against the warmth of Jasper’s stomach. “Look at me,” she orders, and angles her elbow for leverage so she can slide her hand down under the waistband of her jeans, just for the satisfaction of the noise Jasper makes. Blood rushes to Lapis’s ears, pounds hard inside her ribcage. Her own skirt’s puddled up around her hips, a large hand high on her thigh.

She feels like a thief, covertly stealing and overworking this heart that isn’t hers.

A murmur against her throat. _“Lapis.”_

There are no deferrals. They can try to keep each other, but there’s no way to keep them from this.

She opens her eyes, bares her teeth at some future match who’s going to have this heart when it’s decided she’s done with it, and kisses Jasper with every last ache inside of her.

Shadows lengthen on the rose print on the wall.

 

*

 

Autumn petrifies into winter, breaks into spring and then summer. Aramis follows Callunis and invites itself in already baked with heat, wilting everything but the hardiest shrubs and the wicked tough crabgrass that coats the quad, except in the places where they’ve worn footpaths between the cottage doors. There isn’t a drop of rain for all forty-three days that month, lacy clouds scuttling along overhead with their skirts hiked up like they’re stepping over a particularly nasty clump of dirt, not staying long enough to collect any moisture. There isn’t a room in the house where you can’t hear a fan going.

The only place there’s any reprieve is in town, which drops close enough to sea level to at least attract a heady coastal breeze.

In her bedroom on one of these breathlessly hot days, Lapis allows herself a moment to catch her breath, and then another, and then she sits up and swings her legs over the side of the bed, finger-combing her sweaty hair flat in the back.

Her eye’s set on the shelves against the opposite wall, where she knows she’s got a pen and a notebook — well, Big T’s idea of a notebook, which is just a cereal box pulled from the recycling, flattened, and folded backward until it made a bookish shape, with holes punched in it to string looseleaf paper through. To the cardboard front, of course, she’d glued a bunch of cut-out magazine pictures of dogs, because dogs are Big T’s treasures. Making notebooks was cheaper than making a whole special trip just to buy some, and _it’s good for you, when you’re new, because it’s yours and none of us have ever had possessions before, you know? You can fill it however you want._

She’s thinking it might be time to get a radio. How one goes about finding a pirate channel, however … she’s got some ideas, and she needs to write them down before she forgets.

A hand snags her by the elbow.

“No,” Jasper tells her, drawing her inexorably backwards. “Now it’s time for lassitude.”

Lapis drops her shoulder and twists her arm free, but it’s lacking her usual vehemence. 

She glances back at the woman in her bed, thinking “lassitude” the kind of word Caretaker Lauren would have included as extra-credit on her spelling tests.

“You don’t even know what that means,” she says accusingly.

“Sure I do,” is Jasper’s prompt reply. “It means you have to admit that was good enough sex to not _immediately_ hop right out of bed afterward.”

Lapis pretends to think about it.

“It was adequate, but the bed’s a bit small for me, you, and your ego.”

There’s a beat, and then Jasper snaps her eyes open and scowls. Lapis grins.

She does let herself be drawn back down, though, pulled back into her pillows and the mussed-up quilt. Even in summer, it’s much better to be surrounded by Jasper’s body than it is to be alone anywhere else, and Lapis has already forfeited this fight, except — 

“I’m warning you, my thighs are sticky,” she says, shameless.

Jasper’s mouth twitches, but otherwise doesn’t react, and it’s Lapis’s turn to scowl. She doesn’t like how the progression of their respective training has started giving Peridot and Jasper an immunity to the discussion of bodily functions. Don’t they know this robs her of one of her greatest sources of amusement? Citrine and the others can at least be relied upon to _shriek_ at the words “vaginal discharge,” and there’s a flat rule against discussing bowels at the dinner table, which means Lapis tries to do it as often as possible, muffling flatulent noises against the heel of her hand until the new kid starts looking a little green and Peridot’s hand trembles on her dinnerware with how hard she’s trying to suppress her giggles.

“Did you hear me —“

“Yeah, yeah. We’ll clean up in a moment.” 

Jasper rolls half-way onto her stomach and slings an arm around Lapis, pulling her snug up against her chest, and Lapis’s world telescopes down to this: Jasper’s jaw and her eyelashes and the edge of her ear, crowned by a messy ridge of hair from where they’d hastily thrown her mane into a stiff plait before it could get in the way during sex.

Her freckles are a little raised from her skin’s surface, Lapis notices. From a distance, they make her face look striped; one darker splash of color bisecting her face like a scar, but in actuality, it’s dozens of tiny brown freckles that make a galactic belt of stars over her cheek and nose. Lapis smiles, dragging a hand up in between them in order to trace their path, and Jasper shifts her head just enough to glance an absentminded kiss off her wrist.

On the other side of her bedroom door, she can hear the TV running downstairs, the others talking loudly over it.

Peridot’s voice suddenly soars above the others, a dismayed and over-exaggerated caterwaul, “ _Noooooo!_ A catch! _Fine,_ what are your demands?”

And Carnelian, answering in a singsong: “You have to hold my hand the _whole time.”_

“ _No!”_ Peridot says again, aghast. “I know where it’s been!”

Everybody laughs, the three new donors a beat behind the others.

Lapis remembers doing that, too — sitting on the corduroy sofa with her knees drawn up to her chest, cold and shivering in spite of her layers and wondering if shows are _supposed_ to be in another language, because the words said individually sound familiar, but they make no sense strung together and it wasn’t until the others laughed that Lapis realized the people on screen were trying to be funny. She’d thought it had been the great hallmark of her independence, moving to the Cottages with Peridot, but all she wound up doing was looking to the others for somebody to mimic.

She lays there for a long time, one leg slung over Jasper’s ribs. Every breath Jasper takes expands into her with a sensation like tectonic plates, shifting.

The change rises in her slow and gloomy, like some sloppy horror of a sea monster trawling its way up from a lightless depth. No matter how she swallows and tries to force it back down, she feels sharp teeth and stingers and a slimy tentacle grip take hold of her heart. The bad feeling swamps into her stomach, turning it to brine.

She finds her voice, brackish and barnacled:

“Why do you even want me around?”

Jasper slits one eye open.

With her usual disregard for caution, she says, “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because I’m —“

 _Terrible,_ she thinks. _I wanted to hurt you, I wanted to hurt Peridot, and I wanted to hurt the Crystal Gems for leaving us in this situation, while at the same time knowing they would have to be my biggest allies._

_And now I don’t want any of that, but I can’t see any way out of this without hurting everyone more._

_Is this what I’m going to leave behind? Everyone knows Bismuth by her architecture and her arson, Tourmaline by her terriers, Fluorite by her nifty machines — but is this how they’re going to remember me? Lapis Lazuli and all her messy misery._

And she says, “Because for my dream to succeed, I’ll be gone and the Authority’s going to hurt you in my place. All of you.”

She drags the back of her hand over her eyes, thinking this kind of honesty is probably too raw to be witnessed. The others can crack all the “nemesis” jokes they want, Rose Quartz is Jasper’s greatest fear.

It comes out of her with difficulty:

“… why would you _want_ that?”

And she’s watching, so she’s at close range when the answer crosses Jasper’s face, naked and unguarded, and she is suddenly, abruptly, totally _terrified_ of it, this truth coming up under her like a shadow underwater.

She bolts upright, dislodging Jasper’s hand from her flank and moving to get up, to get _away,_ except —

“I decided on you,” is said to her back, and Lapis freezes.

Moving slow, intentional, Jasper pushes herself up, too, drawing her knees up under her, and that’s not the truth Lapis saw in her face, but maybe she isn’t the only one who’s afraid of it.

Lapis turns, making eye contact, and Jasper says it again, with conviction. “I decided on you.”

She braces herself with one hand and reaches out with the other to cup Lapis’s face under her hair, and Lapis lets her eyes drift shut. Her own hands come up, fingers forming a loose cage around Jasper’s forearm.

“ _You,”_ Jasper murmurs, very close now, “and nobody else.”

The truth scampers behind their backs, trying to keep out of sight, and to Lapis’s surprise, she’s the one who outs it.

“You wanted to apply with me,” she whispers, the words half-lost up against Jasper’s mouth.

Their noses nudge up against each other as Jasper shakes her head, slow.

“Wouldn’t work.”

And that strangled sea monster feeling is back, constricting in her stomach. 

Her eyes snap open. She pulls away.

“Then why are you with me?” she demands. “Don’t waste your time! Why aren’t you with somebody you _can_ apply with? Like —“

And she fumbles, because being on the receiving end of Jasper’s attention is often like blunt-force trauma, and she hasn’t seen anyone else get mowed over. It’s been her and Peridot and Jasper for two years, with little variation.

“Don’t need to,” Jasper tells her, combing the fringes of her hair back from her eyes and pulling her in again. “Love,” and _there_ it is, there’s the word that makes Lapis want to recoil, hop from this bed, and go somewhere, _anywhere_ else. She never outgrew that adolescent urge to ignore everything she couldn’t control about herself, to pretend it’s not there. She’s not like Peridot, frightened of missing every opportunity. She doesn’t know how to sit here and be someone about whom the word “love” is used. There’s no script for this.

But she can’t move. Jasper’s hands on her anchor her.

“Love,” Jasper tells her, with peculiar intensity, “makes you bigger and stronger than you are alone. _That’s_ what you’ve got to prove, I think, to get the deferral — that we’re better together.”

As she speaks, her bottom lip brushes up against Lapis’s top lip, and Lapis follows the movement, swaying in, but before she can be lured into a kiss, Jasper pulls back.

“But _you_ — you’re all kinds of powerful all on your own. One of you is worth two of everyone else. You don’t _need_ it, not the way the rest of us do.”

“That’s not true, that’s —“

“I _know_ I can handle you. But — only if you trust me with it.”

_I decided on you._

“Lapis.”

“Yeah,” Lapis says hoarsely. “Come here.”

And the unspoken, there as she tilts her head, opens her mouth, and kisses back, is that she decided on Jasper, too, whether she meant to or not.

Of all the people she could have fixated on and forced to stand in for every vendetta she has, of all the limitations she wanted to stretch and break, of _all_ the people at the Cottages whose time she could have monopolized instead — and she decided on Jasper.

 

*

 

So this is what remains, when you’ve cleaved away everything else, dumped it on ice and wheeled it off. This is what’s left, the most vital and fundamental parts of them:

Peridot’s fear that she’ll miss the best life she’ll ever live because she didn’t _try._

Jasper’s enduring belief that after she’s dead, her heart will beat in someone else’s chest and hurt without knowing why. If she has to die so someone else can have her Pink heart, then they better be prepared to carry what’s in it.

And Lapis, whose mind wants wings, whose heart wants roots. Who wants the fighting inside of her to _stop._

 

*

 

And then Aquamarine from the north point cottage gets her notice, and when they take her away, her new carer drops the news.

An Amethyst has gone missing from the recovery center in Delmarva — some runty XS cut who’d been raised in the Prime Kindergarten, and this is alarming for two reasons: the first, she’s already done one donation; and the second, no one’s ever snuck in or out of a recovery center before.

 _She’s found them,_ Lapis thinks, so clearly it’s orographic, an impact and a sudden lift through every part of her.

_She’s become a Crystal Gem._

These aren’t just escapes happening in the past. They’re happening _now._

And she decides.

 

*

 


	2. The Deferral

*

 

**Strawberry Fields Recovery Center, Delmarva**  
**Year 24, Diamond Standard**

 

At the end of Mortalis, Jasper makes her second donation.

It’s unremarkable, no complications, and she’s fine the day or two immediately after surgery, and then the site goes septic.

 

*

 

She loses two weeks and twenty pounds to it, as fever and infection make a battleground out of her body. Time turns sticky and impossible, hours sliding away in chunks while miserable seconds cling, a sticky residue she can’t get off her fingers. She looks back and remembers nothing, spare one thing, flaring out of the darkness as bright as a struck match — Garnet’s phosphorus voice on the radio, saying they’ve shut down another dialysis clinic in Keystone.

 _Of course,_ she thinks, with perfect, acerbic clearness, staring at the IV pole looming above her. _Because if you’re middle to upper class, why bother with dialysis? Just buy yourself one of our kidneys._

And then, even more poisonously:

_And what about poor people? Is there a coupon for them?_

Restlessly, she turns her head on her pillow, distracted by the sweat clinging damply to her scalp, and glares at the radio like sheer force of will can make Garnet’s voice speak again.

She needs it to — from the very first time she heard it, while Eyeball idly turned the knob and then said, soft, “ah, pirate radio — soldier, you need to hear this,” Garnet’s voice has acted like a punch flung right at her face, and she reacts to it the same way every time, going combative. Garnet never has to come out and say it outright, but she has a way of talking that gets right in your face and says, _I’m here, I’m me, I exist as I am and as no other, and I am stronger than you in every way. So what’s your excuse?_

What’s your excuse, Jasper?

What is your —

When her fever breaks, it’s the early hours of the morning. She’s sweated her sheets translucent and her IV is dry — the overnight nurses have always been lax when it comes to that, since overnight in the donor ward is something of a holiday shift for them — and when she looks around, she finds Peridot by her bedside, trying to read by a single book-light draped around her neck. A glossy fashion magazine flops open over her knee, and Jasper’s gummed-up eyes can barely make out the sight of what looks like alien antenna before she decides she doesn’t want to know what _kind_ of fashion it is. Peridot’s neck droops — she’s all but asleep.

But not deeply enough, because when Jasper shifts around, trying to find a position that isn’t uncomfortable for fourteen different reasons, her head jerks.

And she must forget — her mask of cool, efficient professionalism slips.

Even then, maybe Jasper wouldn’t be able to decipher what, exactly, flinches across her face in that instant, but she knows Peridot now in a way she never did at the Cottages.

“Ah,” she says, in understanding. “So that’s it, then?”

Peridot’s mouth wobbles, then crumples.

Getting her elbows under her, Jasper weakly shoves herself up into a sitting position. Her voice comes out brusque.

“How long until I complete?” she asks.

In the manner of someone trying to pitch a tent in the mud, Peridot wrestles her face under control; she props her smile up on poles and tries not to slip too much.

She says, “You’ll be in respite for weeks, following this,” in that pragmatic way. “And they won’t do any surgery on you while you’re still at risk from infection. Depending on how well you improve, you could still make it past your third donation.”

“But you don’t think it’s likely.”

“It’s not ideal, but completion on the third is within the margin for average.” There’s a sticky moment where neither of them mention Carnelian, or anybody else who had the bad form to complete on their first, or second, and then she attempts another smile. “I’ll have you know this is going to mess with people’s bets. The pool leans towards you making it past your fourth — something about your bad attitude outweighing how badly they want you for being Pink?”

Jasper smiles at that.

A beat of silence follows, and she fishes around in her ponytail for her hair band, careful not to stretch the big, ugly wound in her side. When she tries to pull it out, she finds that her hair’s gone and knotted around it.

“But,” says Peridot, very quiet, “in my experience, if someone _wants_ to complete, then there’s very little that will stop them from doing so.”

Jasper stops her tug-of-war. “Peridot.”

Briskly, Peridot slaps her magazine shut and unfolds from the chair.

“I’ll just tell everyone it’s because you’re from Beta,” she says, fast, like she’s trying to bury what she just said. “It was always the most second-rate of all the kindergartens. They teach you that in carer training, you know, they warn you — not everywhere can be as good as Hailsham. Donors from Beta provide adequate donations, sure, but they never last long. How could they?”

And … then there are times when pragmatism slips right into callousness.

 _I was just being honest,_ says Peridot’s voice out of her memory.

_That’s ALL you were being. Just honest._

Jasper tries to quiet her breathing around the hurt.

 _That’s not the Beta kindergartener’s fault!_ she wants to yell. She wants to free herself from her bedsheets and take up every inch of available space, tower to her full height. Her _Beta_ height. She’s not in a position to do these things. _Why should we be blamed for the failings of those who were supposed to provide for us!_

And that’s —

That’s a Lapis sentiment.

It stops her cold, sticks its foot right in her way and knocks her chin-first into the ground. She blinks.

Something must happen to her face, because the lines around Peridot’s eyes soften, and her hands relax from their stranglehold around her magazine.

“Do you want —“

“No,” Jasper snaps, temper fraying. “No, I don’t want you to do anything. If I wanted to — to talk to her, I’d jump into the ocean and do it myself.”

“That’s not where she is.”

“I don’t _care,”_ it comes out belligerent and bully-fisted. “I don’t — I never — no. Peridot, just — go away. If you can’t be bothered to do anything useful, you’re wasting my time!”

To her annoyance, Peridot doesn’t respond to the bait, and Jasper growls in frustration.

If fighting with Lapis had always felt cataclysmic, destructive, leaving her with a sensation like there’d been a nuclear meltdown in her chest, sticking the radioactive residue of her heart and lungs up against her ribs, then fighting with Peridot holds the unglamorous feeling of a routine inconvenience, like bad traffic or being left with all the dishes after an experimental meal.

With the exception of that incident in the beginning with Jasper’s face and the IV pole, Peridot’s habit is to just laugh whenever Jasper gets tetchy. And Jasper _hates_ that laugh, loud and insincere as it is, because it never fails to piss her off even more, and then she just looks ridiculous, getting spitting mad at Peridot’s laughing face.

(She’s guessing that’s probably the point.)

It doesn’t matter, though, because an infected donation site means scarring, means a recurring weakness, means she’ll be prone to more infections in the future, and those donors aren’t the ones who make it to record donations. Jasper is going to complete soon, and it’s what she wanted since the beginning, isn’t it? She wanted to condemn them all to this, because she thought that’s what they were meant to do.

Even before Lapis made her a scapegoat, that’s why they crumbled.

Because she was going to hurt someone in her crusade and Lapis had no desire to be in the damage path; because Lapis was going to make a break for it and Jasper didn’t want to be chained to her ankle when she drowned. And they lived in such close quarters that these things, in the end, were all they could see when they looked at each other.

So they fell apart, one vital donation at a time.

She shakes her head. If there was any part of her that thought it possible — that Lapis could be tracked down in whatever cove she bolted to, that she could sit down with her and say, _you were right, you know, we deserve better than this,_ and _I’m sorry,_ then she’ll bury it. 

It’s too late. Jasper’s out of time.

 

*

 

But then Peridot says, very softly, “They rotated donors while you were out, you know.”

And.

“She’s here, in the ward downstairs.”

And Jasper feels it like a kick, like her heart has stopped, no donation necessary.

 

*

 

It’s four days before she can be moved.

She doesn’t go far, just from the bed to the chair by the window, but the effect leaves her drained, her knees weak. The muscles in her abdomen tremble even when she’s trying to sit still. Her body feels like replaced equipment, shoddily-made and malfunctioning, and she grits her teeth so hard her aching jaw will be added to the list of locking muscles by the end of the day.

“Why aren’t I in my old ward?” she asks the nurse who comes in to check her for clots, but the woman just shrugs.

It’s a new room on a floor she’s never been to before, with yellow wallpaper and two beds, the other of which is unoccupied, corners briskly turned down and smelling faintly of bleach every time Jasper edges past to get to the bathroom. All her treasures have been relocated to the bedside table — her radio, her paint cans, the lapis lazuli pendant from Carnelian, her art haphazardly stacked behind the O2 machine. She can imagine what her bed looks like back in her own ward, emptied, unless somebody new already occupies it. She wonders what Eyeball and Obsidian think, that she came back from her donation and then disappeared.

 _Is this common?_ she wonders. To be moved to smaller, more private rooms after your second donation?

Or is it because Jasper came so close to failing? 

Did they remove her because it would damage the morale of her wardmates, seeing her like this?

She moves the radio to the windowsill, turned down low, and leans all her weight on her left arm, trying to keep her right side from touching anything. She likes what’s currently playing — some upbeat, punchy song about women finally allowed show their teeth and their claws. Finally allowed to be monsters. _I am not your fluffy bunny pet. I am not your soft fur, your traumatic rescued bird._

_You can’t keep me here anymore._

“Oh,” says the nurse in surprise. “I haven’t heard this song in years! You were probably still in school when this was in the top forty.”

“Probably,” agrees Jasper absently. She turns her head, ambushed by a memory from the Cottages: Lapis and Peridot in the kitchen, belting out the refrain and holding soup ladles to their mouths like microphones the way they’d seen someone do on television. _Please wash those when you’re done,_ had been Amber’s long-suffering comment, and everyone else moved around them to get their dishes, tolerant.

 _She’s alive,_ Jasper thinks, and the weight of it knocks her sideways. She closes her eyes.

_They’ve got her here._

When the song is done, she changes channels and listens to the end of a wrestling match, the announcer roaring tinnily. The Purple Puma’s been winning from the start, but everyone acts like it’s an upset.

And then it segues, if your dial is a fraction of an inch off the station, into the bootleg broadcast.

“This is Garnet,” says the familiar voice. “Back together.”

Jasper’s eyes open.

The window overlooks the front drive, a long curve of a road leading up to the non-donor entrance, lined with scrubby bushes that would probably make a beautiful sweep of ornamental green in the summer. People come and go, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanying others who move with the caution that comes with an unreliable body. Jasper wonders what that’d be like, living without an escort. Free to leave.

A taxi driver holds a door open for someone. Two women in coats walk down the road, swinging the hands of the child between them.

Jasper cranes her neck, struck with a sudden thought. _Are those parents?_

What a fairytale concept.

“ _Pow,”_ Garnet tells her, with emphasis. Then she laughs, out of sync, and Jasper can hear Ruby, and hear Sapphire, but in the next moment they draw breath and speak with the same voice again. Everything they’ve ever done, they do in unison. Jasper’s envy alone feels like a slow death.

She sits there, uncomfortably braced so the pain isn’t catastrophic, and listens to Garnet. It occurs to her, out of nowhere, that she’s mad. 

It’s almost a surprise, the way this knowledge flips a switch in her head; this is what's wrong. The stew in her stomach isn’t just nausea from medication.

She is blindingly _furious_ with Peridot.

She can’t remember the last time she was mad at her. _Truly_ mad. Peridot’s always been an annoyance at worst, and a steadfast ally at best, someone she could depend upon to want to keep Lapis as safe as she did, even if they disagreed on the methods and Lapis flatly refused to listen to either of them. It wasn’t until they were out of the Cottages that they even developed a respect for each other.

Carnelian always said that your friends are the people who have the power to hurt you, but don’t, and it’s news to Jasper, that Peridot had that power. Had it all along.

_You KEPT that from me! You let me think —_

_Didn’t you WANT to think it? What was I supposed to tell you? ‘Lapis never got away! You suffered for nothing! Sorry!’_ She’d folded her arms, then unfolded them with a glower, the way she does when she’s trying to hide nervousness. _I don’t know. Here’s a ladder, Jasper, get over it._

Behind her, the door opens. 

She thinks it has to be the nurse again, or one of the techs, but then she hears a beep as a wrist gets swiped over a chip reader: _Donor registered._

“Go _away,_ Peridot,” she grinds out, bending closer to the windowpane. Her side wails, a sudden ambush that robs her of breath.

A beat.

Something moves against the floor. Footsteps, maybe.

And then there’s a hand on her shoulder, a cool palm sliding to cradle her neck. 

Jasper’s breath hitches.

The absence melts away, just like that. The falling apart happens in reverse, all at once.

She turns, too fast, and the first thing she sees is the tiredness in Lapis’s face, the skin drawn in under her bruised eyes. Her mouth is chapped, feathered with dead skin, same as Jasper’s — they’re both just one smile away from a split lip. It gives her a bad jolt. Here’s something new to miss, unexpectedly: the flushed, angry Lapis who smacked her wrist against the chip reader every night, _here, donor UNHAPPILY registered._

With an aborted noise, her arms go around Lapis’s waist, drawing her in with sudden urgency.

“Hey, handsy,” Lapis complains, and Jasper almost chokes, because her voice hasn’t changed at _all._

“I don’t — I didn’t, I … I didn’t _think,”_ comes out of her, muffled against the pale blue hospital smock. “I didn’t imagine. I thought you’d be long gone by now, a — a Crystal Gem, or —“

 _— dead,_ she doesn’t say, but the shape of it is there.

She feels, more than sees, Lapis shake her head.

“I’m on my third donation,” she murmurs, and Jasper’s arms spasm, causing her to hiss out a “ow! _Careful!”_ , but the blood’s already been spilt: even the strongest donor can’t put up much of a fight after her third donation. And after the fourth, there’s rarely anything left in the body that can be spared, and then you’re just counting down the days until you aren’t viable anymore, until you can rest.

Lapis’s days are as numbered as her own.

Slowly, with an awful sense of inevitability, she lets her forehead sink against Lapis’s belly. Arms go around her head, fingers spidering out across her shoulder and drifting.

When she speaks, it’s as if her voice is plumbed from an unfathomable depth, someplace so deep inside of here there’s no chance of light, and everything still alive that far down has been crushed out of shape, skeletal-thin, bug-eyed, and monstrous. 

“Lapis,” she says, mouth on the fabric over Lapis’s stomach.

“Jasper,” Lapis answers, like she’s been hoarding the syllables of it, like if they went and stood over her bedside table, there they’d be among her treasures, set in a pendant and hung on a chain. “What did you just donate?”

Jasper reaches, fingers moving from Lapis’s elbow to her wrist, and she pulls her hand down her side. The shape of the surgical site is unmistakable.

“Oh, no,” she says softly.

“I’ll be fine,” says the Pink affiliate who hijacks her at moments like this. “A nurse tried to tell me there’s a lot you can still do with only one lung. One day I might even be able to climb stairs without losing my breath.”

Lapis contracts, just far enough to kiss the top of her head. 

“Fuck that,” she says, soft. “And fuck them.”

Jasper shifts her chin to make room for a grin. She closes her eyes, and holds Lapis against her.

She thinks, _but look how long we can hold our breath, underwater._

Because here they are, coming close enough to the surface that their ears pop, their eyelids burn. Then they break surface, and the world comes rushing back in.

 

*

 

Lapis and Peridot argue in the front seat of the car for the last half-hour of the drive. Repeatedly, Lapis tugs on her seatbelt to free her range of motion for dramatic gestures, and Peridot takes her hands off the wheel to reply in the like.

Jasper sits in the backseat, keeping her smashed-up face pressed up against the window so she doesn’t miss a second of sky. She sees the bare-knuckled trees give way and change, evergreens rising out of the landscape like brushstrokes the further north they go. She watches for birds, sees them darting in and out of branches and sitting in clusters on powerlines, puffed up against the cold. Peridot changes lanes so that a beige sedan can pass them, and a white speckled dog standing up in the back window pricks its ears forward when Jasper makes eye contact, and she misses Big T’s terriers with a sudden, fearsome ache.

“— excuse me,” Lapis is saying. “You’re questioning _me_ on how to read maps? _Me?”_

“I’ve done a lot more traveling than you have,” Peridot reminds her archly.

“You tried to flush yourself down a toilet when we were eleven,” she fires back, although what that has to do with anything, Jasper isn’t sure.

“I _told_ you, that seemed like the fastest way to clean my shoes. I admit, climbing _into_ the toilet instead of just taking my shoes off wasn’t my most brilliantly thought-out plan, but I wasn’t expecting to get caught! I’ve matured since then —“

“ _That’s_ a lie — because if you don’t listen to me you’re going to flush yourself down with the rest of the crap, now take the exit I tell you to!”

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am,” Peridot responds, oozing sarcasm.

Jasper wonders if she should interject, but so many of her parts are sore and undefended right now, and this stabs straight into one: _Peridot let you believe she was missing Lapis, too._

_Did Lapis ask her to lie, or did she do that all on her own?_

Everything gets quieter once they turn off the highway, and the country road, in turn, narrows down and turns into a dirt path. In places, the trees grow so thickly around the road they form knotted bowers overhead. She bets it’s beautiful in the summer, the sunlight coming through the leaves dappled and lacy.

“Are you _sure —“_ Peridot starts, and the knot in Lapis’s shoulders goes highwire tight.

It snaps in Jasper’s teeth like thread. “ _Peridot.”_ Their eyes meet in the rearview, and she subsides.

Then, up ahead: a gate.

Peridot lifts her foot off the gas and they coast to a stop in front of it. 

“Hm,” she says.

They study the obstruction. It’s not a tall gate, and there’s no barbed wire, but it’s padlocked and hung with a sign that says **NO TRESPASSING.**

“Do you see a chip reader?” Peridot asks inanely, dropping her hands from the steering wheel. Then, “Right, stupid question. Nobody said anything about this.”

Jasper draws herself up. “Well, what if …”

“— Jasper, my phone’s back there, can you hand it up to me. I’ve got to consult —“

The passenger door pops open, and out Lapis goes, skirt kicking. Her heels crack the film of ice that coats the edge of the road.

“Or — sure, Lapis, okay,” says Peridot, gesturing.

Lapis crosses in front of the car and climbs the first two rungs of the gate, hanging over the top in order to study the chains woven securely through the padlock. But that must have been for show, because with a few good tugs, the knot simply falls apart, and the side of the gate that Lapis is standing on slowly swings back towards them. She turns her head and makes direct eye contact through the windshield.

“Did she tell you she bashed the chip reader to smithereens on the day they came and took her from the Cottages?” Peridot comments appreciatively.

“No,” says Jasper, impressed.

“Yeah. With a bat.”

“Wish I could have seen it.”

“Me, too.”

Their eyes dart at each other fast, catch in the middle like kindling. A beat, and then Peridot’s face eases, her smile coming up tentative. Jasper shows teeth — which is friendly, for her.

Lapis gets back in, saying, “I think maybe they close for the winter.”

“Why would they do that?” Peridot asks, baffled. Then, just as quick, “Do you think maybe we shouldn’t go in?”

Lapis levels her with a lizard-like look. She looks back.

As one, they both turn to Jasper, who snorts and says, “Don’t look at me, do what you what. Say it was my idea. What are they going to do, arrest me _more?”_

Lapis looks back to Peridot. Her mouth curls up at the corners the way autumn leaves do, a crisp upturn of her lips. Peridot sighs, and reaches for the gear shift.

A short ways through the gate, the road starts up a noticeable incline, and the car — which regularly shuttles Peridot from one end of the country to the other — protests this with a laborious whine, to which Peridot says, all sympathy, “Suck it up.”

Finally, they bump up onto pavement as the road pools into a carpark. All the stalls are empty spare for a hatchback with a flat tire and leaves frozen under its wiper blades, clearly abandoned for a long time. As they pull into a spot, Jasper spots deserted picnic tables and a closed-up shack guarding the mouth of a single hiking trail that disappears up into the trees.

The sign in front of it says: 

**CHALK CLIFF FALLS.**  
**Midpoint Spire Visitors Entrance.**

“Are we walking from here?” she asks, her voice going deep to hide her trepidation. She thought this was going to be a drive-by trip. Waterfalls can be seen from the car, right?

“Yup!” says Peridot cheerfully. “Remember, Lapis, if we run into anybody, this is your death’s wish trip. So act like you’re dying.”

“Yeah, okay,” Lapis agrees, but when Peridot and Jasper look at her expectantly, she does absolutely nothing, just sits down by the footwell to tug her boots on over her bare feet and returns their look with an expression so flat you could probably sail right off the edge.

“… sure, good job, Lapis,” says Peridot. “You’re nailing it.”

Once a donor gets their notice and leaves the Cottages, the only opportunity to see the outside world again is by a death’s wish.

Death’s wishes are pitches made to a recovery center’s committee, as one last act of kindness to repay donors for their sacrifice. These day-trips can be anywhere a donor’s carer is willing to go, and can include a party of up to four people. If someone is as aggressive about their friendships as Eyeball is, they can potentially be invited on enough death wishes to see a good portion of country. Nor does it have to be a trip to the outside world — there are other things a death’s wish can be spent on.

Peridot pulls a backpack out of the trunk and slings it on, adjusting the straps and puffing herself up with importance. Her outfit makes sense, suddenly: thick-soled boots at least two sizes too big (“those can’t be comfortable.” “Looks are half the point of any outing, okay!”) and her camo-print cargo shorts have more pockets than Jasper has remaining organs. Her skinny, naked shins look ridiculous and cold.

Clearly here to enjoy herself and act the part, she sets off at a brisk pace towards the hiking trail.

The enforced march doesn’t last long: Lapis and Jasper aren’t motivated to move much faster than an amble.

They pass the sign that says “CLOSED” and head up into the trees, woods closing around them.

“Why here?” Jasper asks her, watching Peridot come to a halt further up the path, impatiently waiting for them to catch up. Everything is still and quiet, frosted over, and the crunch of their footsteps seems overloud, like they’re the biggest things on the move. Jasper’s experience with nature is limited to her not-quite four years at the Cottages, and even this is startling. “For your death’s wish?”

“We’re close to my kindergarten,” Lapis answers.

Jasper blinks. “Homeworld?”

Her dying wish is to go back to _Homeworld?_

“Hailsham. It used to be a a travel center, and there’s a replica version of the Chalk Cliff Falls in the back — it’s half-pool, half-fountain, meant for kids. We all played in it. Except me,” she presses a hand to her heart, feigning humility. “I declared it _my_ dominion and everyone had to ask me, the water witch, permission to join me. Peridot can tell you. But — even though it’s only a few miles away, I’ve never laid eyes on the real thing.”

She explains the geology as they climb — the ground hadn’t looked like it was at such an incline from below, and it probably isn’t, but Jasper can hear herself starting to labor for breath — about how the composition of the cliffs along the northern shoreline is so radically different from the composition of the delta that when the big, lazy river meets the start of the cliffs, the weaker soil gives way. The waterfalls cut the land into a series of natural terraces.

She’s still talking when, up ahead, Peridot comes to an abrupt halt and says, “Holy _shit.”_

Lapis and Jasper exchange a look, then hike a little faster.

They crest over the top of a rise, and the forest falls away, opening out over a stunning vista of the Chalk Cliff Falls. An information plaque is planted immediately in the foreground, as minuscule as a mosquito bite against the larger view.

“ _Oh,”_ Lapis breathes, shocked.

There are two sets of waterfalls, making three separate levels altogether that curve around in a half-moon shape around the enormous bowl of the lake below — they’re currently standing on the edge of the middle tier, looking at the waterfalls cascading above and below them.

Or they would, but the Falls are completely frozen.

Frosted, blue-white columns pour over the edges of the cliffs, plunging to meet the fragments below. Rocks make strange, awkward protrusions from the bulge of ice, their large noses bristling with icicles. In some places, the ice is so thin the movement of the water underneath is still visible, churning on its seaward journey, and Jasper has no trouble imagining what the Falls would look like in the height of summer, a kicked-up swirling charybdis of mist and foam. 

She sees, too, how the Midpoint Spire got its name — the Falls are so big that it’s got islands.

They jut from the waterfalls and grow upward from the pools in twisted, water-beaten shapes. In warmer weather, they would probably be overgrown with moss and lichen and opportunistic plant life blown in by the wind. A few bony trees are visible, clinging tenaciously to the surface of the largest island. Signs everywhere warn visitors against swimming or boating.

“This is …” Lapis starts, and can’t finish.

Peridot squints at the sky and mutters something about parasailing, whatever _that_ is.

No matter how long she stands and stares, Jasper keeps finding something new to look at, but her muscles are starting to cramp — even just standing and walking, she can’t get enough oxygen to them, apparently. Her shortness of breath has sharpened into a stabbing pain, centered low on her side. If Lapis and Peridot are going on, she realizes with resignation, they’re going without her.

She finds the outermost groove of the lookout point, where even in winter she can see the places where generations of foot traffic have worn paths into the dirt.

Behind her, Peridot makes a rude noise.

Appearing at Jasper’s side, she fishes a rolled-up blanket out of her jack-of-all packs, which she hands down to her, then responds to her look by saying, “well, if you don’t want me to _treat_ you like a stupid clod, don’t _act_ like a stupid clod. Don’t sit on the cold ground.”

She waits until Jasper obediently unfolds the blanket (it’s huge, and after she shakes it out, she can’t help the grateful look she gives Peridot — after a childhood at Beta and all her time fruitlessly sorting through the upcycle bin at the Cottages, it’s nice to have her size considered,) and sits on it. 

The fussy carer expression on her face fades and she nods, satisfied, then announces, “I’m going to see if there’s a path behind those falls.”

“Doesn’t that end badly?” Jasper frowns. “I feel like that probably ends badly.”

“For people on our shows, maybe,” and on that ominous note, off she goes, clanking cheerfully. She seems to have trouble deciding which she wants more, her phone with its built-in camera or her tape recorder, because they keep jumping between her hands.

Jasper watches her go, then turns her head towards Lapis, who hasn’t moved.

She’s reminded, suddenly, of the way they used to watch the storms that brewed out at sea, back at the Cottages. The strongest usually came at the end of Ventis, as the winter winds coming up off the water met the warming spring air, darkening the sky to a shade of murder. Orographic lift kept the stormclouds from reaching land, so it was like watching violence from behind glass.

The expression on Lapis’s face then is the same one she wears now, wide-eyed and wondrous.

She steps forward.

She doesn’t go far — she sets her foot against the edge of the water, where the lake rushes up the rocky shore to meet the hiking path. The ice snaps as soon as she puts pressure on it, and Jasper stiffens, the guardian in her calculating how quickly she could grab Lapis by the waist if she tries to wade out across thin ice.

Fortunately, she doesn’t try, just stays like that at the edge, her hands lifted towards the frozen falls like she’s keeping an orchestra poised, ready to act.

Jasper wonders if she’s remembering a childhood where she could control the smaller, replica version.

She wonders if this is exactly what Lapis wanted from her death’s wish trip.

She wonders if Lapis has regrets.

She opens her mouth.

“You betrayed me,” she says to her, very softly.

Lapis’s back stiffens.

“You pinned all your crimes on me, and had them drag me away in handcuffs.” She tries to keep her voice light. It makes it sound less like an act of arson in her throat, more like drowning. “How long had you’d been planning to do that?”

A pause.

“… since my house arrest,” says Lapis. “In Ventis of our first year.”

It could not have hurt more if she’d taken an icicle — no, a dozen icicles — and stabbed them straight through her, pinning her to the ground where she sits. For a long moment, Jasper can’t breathe around the impact, the sense of impalement. She checks herself for blood.

Lapis steals a look at her over her shoulder, then vents out a frustrated noise and whirls around.

“You’re giving me more credit than I deserve!” she snaps. “I couldn’t _make_ you do everything you did, I’m no puppetmaster, you can’t blame me for _your_ stupidity. You walked right into most of it on your own!”

 _Following you!_ Jasper wants to cry, but it’s no use.

Above her, Lapis looks no different than any other part of the landscape, some sculpture of ice rising out of the Falls — dark, frozen skin and dark, frozen eyes. Her hair, in the light, is so black it’s almost blue. Her balled-up fists look like they’re the only things anchoring her in place.

Then she shifts.

“I thought I was _protecting_ them,” she concedes. “The Crystal Gems. Their dream of freedom.” Her voice drops low. “Rose Quartz and her son.”

Jasper thought she’d feel better, hearing it said out loud.

She doesn’t.

“You don’t even know he _exists!_ You’ve never seen him! He’s just a rumor you heard —“

“So are the deferrals!” Lapis closes the distance, towering over her and forcing her to crane her head back so they can keep glaring at each other. “We have no proof _they’re_ real, either, but you sure did put a lot of effort into defending _them!”_

Jasper flinches, struck true, and tries to rally.

Cold air sticks in her nose, her throat.

How long has she wanted to have this conversation? Why can’t she remember any of the things she wanted to say?

“The Crystal Gems are not your friends,” is what comes out. “They don’t even know you exist. _I_ was —“ _your friend,_ she almost says, except her throat closes over it in a sudden desperate squeeze, because she doesn’t want to see Lapis’s face if she says it out loud and it’s not true. Jasper might not have the keenest sense of self-preservation, but it will protect her from that. “Peridot’s your friend, not them! They left you and her and all of us behind to suffer while _they_ ran away!”

Her voice cracks, slides away from her in glacial chunks to crash into the sea, and she can’t say the rest: _how could you spend all that time with me and STILL not see that?_

Lapis drops into a crouch.

“The Authority doesn’t prefer us to them — it _kills_ us for their families!” she spits, right in Jasper’s face. “That’s what we _die_ for, for the people out there, so that they can keep their mothers and sons and whatever else — and Rose Quartz has a _child,_ Jasper. None of us have ever had that before. Something that vital.”

But Jasper’s been here already. She knows this argument by heart.

She shakes her head, but —

Lapis’s hands uncurl, slow. She looks at them, and her harsh breathing suddenly goes quiet.

“And what did it get me?” comes out, thready and pulled taut. “What did I accomplish?”

“I don’t know,” Jasper tells her. “I was kind of hoping you’d tell me, so I’d at least know I wasn’t forced into early donation in vain.”

Her mouth quirks back, rueful. Bitter.

“Yeah,” she says. “Sorry.”

“Me, too,” Jasper sighs, and sees the tremor run through Lapis’s body. If Peridot’s underdressed, so is she: it’s too cold up here for just a sweater, so Jasper edges to the side and pulls up the blanket, offering part of it to her.

Flashing another smile, Lapis scoots underneath it, wrapping it around her shoulders and huddling into the warm pocket at Jasper’s side. Her knuckles make four distinct points of cold, pressed into the tight, unhappy skin around Jasper’s surgery site. Jasper looks down at the curve of her cheek, that arrowhead point of hair going down the nape of her neck, and feels a fierce and terrible ache. She could almost call it joy.

“I forgot how exhausting that was,” Lapis remarks. “We used to fight like that all the time. Where did we find the energy?”

“Or the time.”

Lapis muses it over.

Pushing her hair back, she peeks up at Jasper slyly. “The sex after was pretty good. I liked that part.”

Jasper lets out a startled laugh. It’s not what she expected Lapis to say (sex hasn’t been anywhere near Jasper’s list of priorities for years,) but it’s true. It had been too brand new and complicated in the beginning, so it had taken time to realize there was a _difference_ between coming slow and coming _hard,_ much less how to tell when one would be more satisfying than the other, especially when her temper ran hot and Lapis responded like hers was too. Sometimes they got their signals mixed, but she likes to think they got the hang of it eventually — at any rate, the awkwardness isn’t what she remembers most about fight-sex. It’s that moment where the need to prove a point became the need to prove something else entirely — _don’t let this be it,_ and _don’t let this be the thing that pulls us apart,_ and _don’t let me go._

_Never let me go, Lapis._

_You promised._

She sucks in a sharp breath, and says in a rush, “I liked it better when we were laughing. Even — even when we didn’t actually finish having sex. Those were my favorite parts.”

“When we didn’t …” Lapis starts, and then, indignant, “You _licked_ my _armpit!”_

Oh, sure, of all the — !

“How was I supposed to know that was _weird!”_ Jasper fires back hotly. “I was licking everything _else!”_

And it works, because suddenly they’re laughing again, helplessly and with their entire bodies, leaning into each other. There’s a constant, understated sound to the Falls, it turns out, even in the dead of winter — the ice bending and cracking from the pressure of the water underneath, the trees knocking together in the wind. Even the sunlight makes noise; it’s too big, and the cold and ice have to make room for it.

Lapis wraps an arm around Jasper’s shoulders, pulling herself up, and there’s a baffling moment when Jasper thinks she’s going in for a kiss.

But instead, she presses their foreheads together. Somehow, that’s even worse. Jasper has no idea how to handle it.

She melts, and makes room.

Lapis says, low, “I watched the guardians drag you off. It was supposed to be my victory — see how _you_ like it,” her fingers dig into the fabric of Jasper’s coat. “But then they took Peridot, too, because she was a carer and you’d need one, she said — walked right out that door and shouted at them, ‘You’re taking me too!’ Somehow I hadn’t thought of that. I lost both of you in one day.

“The worst thing I ever did,” she murmurs. “And I liked it. Parts of it. I never felt more in control of _anything_ than I did when I was planning revenge on you. What … what kind of person does that make me?”

It comes out heavy, like she’s carried it this whole way — a stone set in the center of her back where she can’t reach it, where everyone can see it but her.

Jasper swallows.

 _Be honest,_ she tells herself. 

_But remember, honesty means nothing unless it comes with understanding, too._

As carefully as she knows how, she says, “A young one, I think,” and Lapis blinks and draws back far enough to meet her eyes. Jasper holds her around the waist and continues, “When we’re young, it takes all our bravery to be monsters —“

And Lapis sings back, quiet, “ _— not your soft fur, your traumatic rescued bird. I am the only one who can handle me.”_

Because that’s an important lesson to learn, too: how to love your own teeth and claws. But when you’re older, you can see the wounds that turned you, the bite or the spilt blood contaminated, the places where survival left you fundamentally changed.

“Other people have — well, they have years to grow up, but we don’t. We’ve got so little time to figure it out, compared to them.”

Slowly, Lapis releases her, sliding back to the ground at her side.

“What we had wasn’t healthy,” she says, firm. “I don’t want to do that again.”

“Hey,” Jasper leans after her, trying to catch her eye. “You can’t take all the blame. Give some of it to me, I can carry it, look.”

She draws herself up as big and Pink as possible, emphatically flexing her shoulders. Aside from the twitch at the corner of Lapis’s mouth, she gets no reaction.

But Jasper remembers this part. At first, there hadn’t been room in her for anything except anger: anger at Lapis, anger at Peridot, anger at the _joke_ that was supposed to be her trial, her chance to defend herself, except the Authority needed her to donate and guess what took priority over the truth? Then came desperation, the way she picked apart the bones of every interaction she’d ever had, wondering what doomed her, what she should have said instead, what she should have _done._

There’s a moment in there, where everything else stops, and you think, _maybe I’m … not right._

And, _how do I stop being wrong?_

And then you can _grow._

“What a waste,” Lapis mutters.

Jasper doesn’t know if she’s talking about calling the Authorities on her, and everything she failed to do afterwards — or if she’s talking about everything she and Jasper did since the beginning, so she works her throat compulsively until she’s sure she can speak without her voice breaking, and slides her hand along the underside of Lapis’s arm until their fingers intertwine.

“There’s something my carer said to me, when I was on probation,” she starts. “She said that if I was defined _only_ by the worst things I’d ever done, I’d be fucked.”

It startles Lapis into snorting. “ _That’s_ not very supportive.”

“Nah, really, she’s a good carer.”

Lapis takes her free hand and blows a loud, wet raspberry against her palm, and yeah, okay, Jasper definitely didn’t miss _those._

“I’m serious,” she continues, stone-faced. “She’s very smart, I listen to her advice on most everything. The point is, there’s _more_ to us than that. Than the hurt. That’s not the only thing we are. It’s not the only thing we’ll ever _be.”_

 _Even us,_ she thinks.

“ _Hey!”_ Peridot shouts.

She’s standing on an outcropping of rock a half field’s length away, hands propped on her hips. Her backpack is taller than she is.

“My ears are burning! Are you two gross idiots talking about me? It better be about how smart I am!”

And both Jasper and Lapis burst into laughter.

“What?” calls Peridot, baffled. “What did I say?”

 

*

 

When it gets too cold to stay any longer, Peridot clambers back down to them, showing off her scraped palms and the cool rocks she picked up (which look like any other kind of rock Jasper’s ever seen, but it’s not her place to tell other people what their treasures are.) She folds the blanket and fits it back in Peridot’s backpack, while Lapis goes to stand at the edge of the Falls once more, staring out at the view for a long, long time, like she’s committing every detail to memory.

Then the three of them turn away, and start back down the path towards the carpark.

They haven’t gone far before Jasper — who’d felt fine while she was sitting down — flags, and starts to fall behind.

She ducks her head and gives it a shake, trying to clear the spots from her eyes, but it doesn’t do any good. Pain stabs through her side with every indrawn breath, making it difficult to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. The climb up took more of a toll on her than she thought, she’s realizing, and she didn’t recover. Not at all.

Lapis runs on ahead to check and see how far away the carpark is, and if it’s still deserted.

She shouts something that Jasper can’t hear.

As she swings back, her face goes completely still.

Jasper hears her name as if from a great distance, and the next thing she knows, she’s suddenly being propped up; Peridot under one arm, Lapis under the other.

“— okay? Jasper, are you okay?” Lapis is asking.

“Fine,” Jasper lies. Then, “No.”

Her whole right side feels corrupted, like it’s too swollen, hot, and sick to belong to her. She puts her hands over her ribs, and wonders what they would do if she just tried to peel her skin off right here. Donate _that,_ she doesn’t want it anymore.

It _hurts,_ and she chokes on a laugh.

“You know what’s awful?” she says to them, as they labor one step at a time away from the Falls. “That after everything, _you_ turned out to be _great_ at donating. Much better than me.”

Lapis’s mouth wrenches.

It’s true, though — she entered the system later than Jasper, but she’s already done more donations, and despite all the climbing and hiking they’ve done today, she’s not even out of breath.

“We can’t all be good at our jobs,” she says, and it slices Jasper down to the bone, because she’d said the same about Carnelian when she died.

On her bad side, careful of where she’s got her hands, Peridot says suddenly, “I should have been paying more attention. I was just — it’s the three of us! Together again! It was going to be exactly like it was at the Cottages, us going somewhere new and learning new things. Nothing could spoil it!”

“Sorry,” says Jasper.

Peridot shakes her head. “ _I’m_ your carer, I shouldn’t have pushed you.”

A long ago voice in her memory pulls her aside to whisper, _Your strength is your responsibility. Conversely —_

“— my weakness is not your fault. Give me a little of that blame, Peridot, I can carry it.”

“What,” drawls Lapis, when Peridot says nothing. “You’re not going to flex for _her?”_

“I don’t need to impress her,” Jasper manages to sound glib.

“Please don’t flex,” Peridot adds. “I’ve seen enough.”

 

*

 

In the car on the way down to the gate, Jasper waits for somebody to say it, but nobody does. The car bumps with painful jolts over the uneven road, and Peridot’s eyes flick apologetically to hers in the rearview.

Finally, she puts a hand on the headrest and leans forward.

“Didn’t you want to drive past Homeworld?”

Peridot and Lapis look genuinely startled.

“… to see Caretaker Rebecca?” she presses, trying not to look too pointedly at Peridot, but subtlety has never been Jasper’s strong suit. After a beat, Lapis’s eyes shift over, too, and now they’re both looking. Peridot flicks her attention from them to the road and back again, her brows sunk heavy with confusion.

 _I want to apply for the deferral,_ she had said into the privacy of her tape recorder, and Jasper wasn’t supposed to listen to that.

She’s not sure how to bring it up. But it _has_ to be part of the reason for this trip, isn’t it?

If not now, today, on Lapis’s death wish, then when was she expecting to get the chance to go? She has no doubt that _Lapis_ is what Peridot meant when she said apply; the two of them have been best friends since they were eleven years old, and so what if the script says that it’s got to be a love like the kind Moonstone and Iron had? If what Lapis and Peridot’s relationship has endured isn’t enough to stop death, then Jasper must have a pretty poor understanding of love.

She stares hard at the side of Peridot’s head, but Peridot says —

Nothing.

Jasper frowns. So … maybe she’s wrong. She must not have all the information. She has no way of knowing how long ago that confession in the cafe had been recorded, so maybe it _isn’t_ Caretaker Rebecca who controls the deferrals. Maybe they already tried and got rejected. Maybe —

_There are no deferrals, Jasper._

She leans back, slow.

“Do _you_ want to visit?” Lapis’s face is very strange. “You’ve never been to Hailsham.”

Jasper considers it. See the kindergarten that became the basis from which every other kindergarten was found lacking?

“No,” she decides. “It’s no Homeworld to me.”

They pass through the gate, and Lapis hops out so she can close it behind them again, trying to rearrange the chains around the padlock so it looks like they were never there.

It’s quiet inside the car for a long time after that. To either side of them, patchwork fields lay quiescent, brown grasses bent backwards and frozen. The wind picks up: ice blinking as it moves, dusty snow whisked along the painted lines on the road. Peridot passes a truck with a high profile that gets buffeted by every strong gust. Besides the truck, she’s the slowest car on the road. She’s never struck Jasper as the type to travel the speed limit, but maybe today she’s trying to prolong the journey as much as she can.

“Are you homesick for it?” Jasper hears herself ask.

Peridot answers with a rude noise.

“Puh- _lease,”_ she says, not needing to ask if they’re still talking about Hailsham. “I don’t miss where I wasn’t appreciated.”

There’s a pause, and then she glances sidelong at Lapis, who grips the strap of her seatbelt in a strangle-hold.

She thinks about it, and shakes her head, “Yes, but. The things I miss don’t exist anymore. Or I’ve changed too much. Even if we turned back right now, it wouldn’t be the same. I’m — I’m homesick for a home I haven’t made yet, I think. If that … makes sense.”

It makes so much sense, in fact, that Jasper and Peridot nod several times in a row, back and forth, until Lapis is smiling helplessly.

“ _Stop_ it,” she complains. “You look stupid!”

 

*

 

The drive back to Delmarva passes much the same way the drive up had done: Jasper in the backseat, hungrily watching the countryside go by and listening to Peridot’s stream-of-consciousness, into which Lapis interjects her dry remarks whenever there’s a pause for breath. Sometimes Peridot pauses to rebuke, other times she steamrolls right on. 

If Jasper closes her eyes, she can pretend it’d just been any other day in town and they’re on their way back to the Cottages. All of this is so achingly familiar.

“— is a windmill,” Peridot’s saying, gesturing at the enormous star-shaped turbines visible in the distance. The winds of Ventis have them sturdily chugging away. “They’re war machines, clearly. Big corporations pay the military to produce all this wind, just to make life difficult for the competing businesses that are dependent on the area.”

“You know that’s not how it works, right?” Lapis cuts in. “Listen —“

Instead of doing that, Peridot reaches forward and slowly begins winding up the volume knob on the radio. Lapis keeps talking, explaining that windmills are _actually_ used to harvest energy, except the radio steadily begins to drown her out. Peridot turns her head to make direct eye contact.

The expression on Lapis’s face almost makes the year without her worth it.

Her mouth moves. _What the fuck?_

Peridot gestures, wide-eyed with innocence, and Lapis sticks her tongue out.

“I love you,” Jasper tells them.

They glance at her.

“ _What!”_ Peridot yells. The music pounds loud enough that the windows rattle in their frames. “We can’t hear you!”

“Nothing!” Jasper shouts back in mortification, and she twists her own seatbelt so she can lie down in the backseat, where no one can see her face.

The exhaustion must be catching up to her, she thinks: 

Her mouth keeps twitching into a dozen different smiles, without any direction whatsoever from her brain, the whole rest of the way home.

 

*

 

“This is no use,” says the nurse in frustration. She holds her gloved hands off to the side, her fingers smeared a dark poppy-red. “It’s gone. If I can’t find a vein in your other arm, we’ll have to find another solution.”

Jasper grimaces, shifting to tuck her bad side arm closer to herself. Towards the end, Bloodstone had become so puffed up with water retention that they couldn’t find any veins for an IV in her arms or feet and had to shave her head to get at one on her skull. Jasper will lay down right here and complete out of _spite_ before she lets them touch her hair.

Sitting cross-legged on the unoccupied bed, Lapis watches the nurse maneuver her equipment, the tray and sealed needles and thin tubes coiled in plastic, to the other side of the bed. The room’s cramped as it is — much less space to move around than there’d been in the ward, which is the downside to its privacy, she supposes. Jasper’s watching Lapis instead of the needle, so she sees the frown that pulls her face out of shape when the nurse tugs Jasper’s other arm out and turns it over, heedless of her flinch.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” she asks.

“Nothing — “ Jasper says quickly.

But the nurse talks over her. “Foreshortening from the healing on that side. If she’d been keeping up with her physical therapy like she’s supposed to, she’d have more range of motion by now.”

 _I was unconscious for two weeks!_ Jasper thinks with a hot surge of anger.

She’s saved from saying something — or demonstrating her _exact_ range of motion by decking staff, which is a one-way ticket to a cold slab in an operating room — by the door opening and the beep from the chip reader, registering a donor’s entrance.

The nurse blocks her view, but Lapis turns her head —

— and just as quickly twists away again, wide-eyed and muttering, “Oh, _geez.”_

There’s only one person Jasper knows who gets that reaction from people who’ve never met her before. She sits up.

“Eyeball!” she yells joyfully.

“Yeah,” says Lapis in an undertone. “Not the body part I was looking at.”

“Aha!” comes from the other side of the nurse. “ _Here_ you are!”

The squat, blocky shape of a Ruby shoves herself through the clutter to stand at the foot of Jasper’s bed. Jasper grins at her and in response, she puffs herself up, planting her hands on her hips in her habitual tic to make herself look bigger. The movement lifts her breasts, free as ever under the suspenders. She says, “They took you out and didn’t tell nobody. We didn’t know what to think.”

That’s odd. Surely Peridot would have said something to them - unless she was too worried and it slipped her mind?

Jasper snorts at herself. Yeah, right.

“How is everyone?” she presses, eager. “Obsidian? Army and Navy and —“

_— the rest of our people?_

“Oh, still alive,” Eyeball responds with a glib little flip of her hand. “Which is more than we thought happened to you.” 

Her eye, fixed on Jasper’s face, is keen. 

“So,” she goes. “How close did you come to completing?”

“Pretty close.” Jasper feigns nonchalance, but watches Eyeball’s face just as closely, not without a small amount of relish — which, whatever, dying’s one of the most newsworthy things any of them can do, she’s going to milk being a conversation piece for as long as she can.

“Hmm,” says Eyeball. “Well. Glad you didn’t. Only dopes complete on their second donation.”

Jasper grins back at her, all teeth, and off to the side, Lapis makes a rude noise low in her throat.

Eyeball’s gaze darts dismissively over to her, and then abruptly refocuses, swiveling that sharp expression on her instead. She takes her in, eyes raking her head-to-toe, and comes to attention, arms dropping to her sides, as intent and poised as a knife’s edge.

“Nope, that didn’t work,” the nurse murmurs, oblivious. “Too bad.” 

She yanks the needle back out, and Jasper whistles in a startled breath at the sensation, then grits her teeth as the nurse promptly tries to bruise up another vein.

“That’s Lapis,” she says, wanting a distraction. “Lapis, this is Ruby, but everyone calls her Eyeball.”

“Ahhhhhhhh,” Eyeball releases a slow and hungry hiss. “The girl from the pendant.”

And Jasper feels an unpleasant jolt, because does Lapis even know about that? It’s no secret that there’s a lapis lazuli stone among Jasper 55.1’s treasured possessions, but that’s also a conversation Jasper isn’t sure she wants to have with Lapis in front of witnesses.

But Lapis must already know, because her expression doesn’t change.

“I guess,” she says warily.

Slowly, Eyeball looks from Lapis’s face (which is closed,) to Jasper’s (which is not,) and the corner of her mouth jerks.

“ _Ugh,”_ she complains. “I _hate_ it when it gets gross.”

She turns to Lapis, clasping her hands under her chin and fluttering her eyelashes, which is such an alarmingly uncharacteristic look on her that Jasper lets out a bark of laughter and almost misses her saying, “Do _you_ have a pendant with a jasper stone?”

“No,” says Lapis. “Carnelian — Carnelian’s carer brought me my own namesake, in a ring.”

 _They came as a matching set,_ Jasper remembers, seeing the catalogue page in front of her mind’s eye. _The pendant and the ring. Thank you, Carnelian._

But Eyeball doesn’t know that, so she just lets out a merry cackle.

“So it’s just her who’s an embarrassing sad sack?” she jerks her thumb back at Jasper. “That’s okay, we already knew that.”

Looking discomfited for the first time, Lapis starts, “I —“

“Eyeball,” Jasper cuts in with a sudden frown. How could she have missed it? “What’s wrong?”

For a beat, Eyeball looks caught — like she hadn’t expected to be found out. It _would_ explain why she’s here, now. A mission to find a missing person is a good distraction.

Then she draws herself up, and says casually, “Got guillotined. Doc took me this morning and they gave me the news.”

“Oh, no,” says Lapis faintly.

Jasper stares at her, horrified. “Eyeball …”

Up until this point, the nurse had been paying them no more mind than she would the furniture, but now she looks up, frowning. “Don’t you mean you were cleared for your next donation?”

Eyeball displays her teeth in a distinctly Jasper-ish way.

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” she says sweetly, and makes a theatrical _whoosh-THUMP_ sound effect as she mimes cutting her own head off.

The nurse frowns deeper.

Behind her back, Jasper widens her eyes in warning.

“— which is very good news,” Eyeball finishes, stiltedly. “I’m happy to serve.”

Right then, the syringe the nurse is using to test for veins suddenly fills with return, and she lets out a triumphant “aha!” and gets to work, but not before grumbling in an undertone that’s definitely meant to be overheard, “— better, it’s your _job.”_

Jasper and Lapis and Eyeball all meet each other’s eyes over her head; three very different people who, for one rare moment, are on the exact same page.

 

*

 

Later, when the nurse is finally gone, Eyeball pivots on her heel and, without one further word, engages Lapis in a glaring contest. And wins.

Which shouldn’t be possible, yet here they are, with Lapis conceding.

“I’m going to eat,” she announces, kicking her skirt over the edge of the opposite bed and sliding to the ground. “Bye, Jasper.” 

(And there’s a part of Jasper, permanently twenty years old and frozen in that moment before the Snowflake Quartz and the Amethyst ambushed her, that rises up in a panic at the sight of Lapis slipping out the door. _Don’t go, don’t go, don’t leave me here in this miserable place alone!_ Her breath catches and doesn’t release, not until the Jasper who is here, now, can reassert control. She forces her jaw to relax.) 

Eyeball pulls the chair over and kicks her feet up onto Jasper’s bedspread.

“So,” she says.

“So?”

“So that’s her.”

“That’s her,” Jasper confirms.

Eyeball scrutinizes her for a long moment, then drops her feet (they don’t reach the floor) and leans forward.

“Okay, soldier, help me out,” she says, spreading her hands. “How am I playing this? Are we mad at her for getting you handcuffed and slabbed? Tell me what we’re doing. Do we need to cold shoulder her in the rec room, move places in the canteen, get her wardmates to occupy the bathroom every time she needs it?”

Jasper blinks, very fast. “You’d do that for me?”

“Handcuffed and _slabbed._ Donors are supposed to have each other’s backs.”

“I’m …”

Eyeball studies her face, and the edge of her mouth fishhooks up. She leans back again, digging through her back pocket and surfacing with her butter knife, which she uses to start picking her teeth.

“And people think you’re this big old tough hardass,” she remarks.

“That’s you.”

Eyeball smiles at her, pleased. _Click,_ goes the plastic of the knife against her teeth. “Rubies — and Yellow-affiliated Rubies at that — aren’t really known for any of those things, Jasper. You’ve met Navy, right?”

Jasper shrugs. “Then I guess the white coats are just going to have to find a way to stop us from becoming our own individual people. Their affiliations aren’t sticking.”

The smile widens. “Did you get that from her?”

Jasper opens her mouth. Then shuts it again.

It’s a sudden memory, of Eyeball saying, _do you love her enough to let her shape how you feel about yourself and everyone else?_

She thinks about it and says, “You should ask her to join you the next time you get together, Eyeball. Everything I’ve ever said, she says, but — _better._ Whenever I try, I just sound stupid, so it’s better when she’s the one who’s telling you that you don’t have to be a victim all your life. That you’re more than your prison.”

Eyeball considers this. “She did win at Bluff. You weren’t there, so.”

It’s Jasper’s turn to grin, startled. She wonders what that would have been like, sitting across a circle from Lapis and trying to guess what she survived to get here. She … actually has no idea what Lapis donated, but considering she hiked up to a waterfall after three donations, it’s no surprise that she won at Bluff.

The tip of the butter knife pokes into her shoulder.

“Listen to me,” Eyeball says, low. “I know she’s important to you, but —“

“— if you try to tell me not to trust her because she colluded with the enemy, don’t bother. You can’t tell me anything I haven’t already told myself.”

“I bet I can,” her voice gets scraped off the back of her teeth, dry. “I was _going_ to say — don’t interrupt me — that I’m gonna go ahead and keep sending donors to you, if it’s all the same and good. If she’s there, whatever, she can do the song and dance, but they’re going to be there to see _you.”_

“Eyeball —“

“It means more coming from you,” Eyeball says, firm. “All that stuff about the kindergartens, and indoctrination, and harvesting. I’d believe you over her, any day.”

“I …” Jasper starts, but there’s something stuck in her throat and it takes her several seconds to dislodge it. Eyeball lets her, propping her feet up again and dancing the knife across the backs of her knuckles. The sunlight coming through the window is bloodless, wan and grey, and it’s too bright for Jasper to handle in this moment.

She is bigger and meaner and uglier than Lapis is, that's a fact, and the idea of someone preferring her is ...

“That’s not … how this usually goes.”

And Eyeball smiles: the smile universal to donors everywhere, the smile of one underdog to another. The smile, perhaps, that you’d give a friend.

“Yeah,” she says gruffly. “I figured.”

 

*

 

A week after that, Jasper finds out that Strawberry Fields Recovery Center has a garden.

It’s enclosed in a courtyard at the center of the compound, complete with meandering paths of white bean pebble and a fairytale bridge over a bubbling brook — all of which is currently frozen, of course, the trees bare and still and the shrubs cut back to the ground. Empty webs of groundcover stretch out alongside the paths, dormant flowerbeds crusted over with frost.

Donor access is forbidden, but Jasper finds a door off a maintenance corridor where the employees have taped down the lock so they can come and go to steal a smoke. Sunlight snakes in through the cracks around its frame, and Jasper’s leaning against the corner to catch her breath when one of the office aides comes bursting back in, rubbing her red hands on her slacks and shivering as she hurries away, and Jasper realizes the door isn’t _locked._

The idea makes the guardian in her wail in alarm, but it’s instantly drowned out by the rest of her.

 _That goes outside,_ she thinks, with a sudden weightless _lift_ inside of her. Suspended like that, her guts for once aren’t too heavy to carry. _That could be an escape._

Without even being aware of making the decision, she strides forward and is through the door, quicker than a wink.

Fresh air hits her face, and that alone almost fells her where she stands. That trip to Chalk Cliff Falls had made her even more aware of how little time she has left and how little access she has to everything she’s missing, fresh air and trees and sky being at the top of the list.

She could complete right now, she thinks, turning her face up to it — the cold freezing the hairs in her nose, the breeze managing to work its way through her heavy hair to her scalp — and she would die absolutely _grateful_ to lazy employees who didn’t want to walk all the way across the street to smoke.

It doesn’t take her long to realize that there’s no access to the perimeter.

(Which she probably could have figured out on her own if she’d stopped and thought about the layout of the building.)

The biggest tree is planted in the center, bare-knuckled and barely creaking as Jasper limps up to stand underneath it. Its bark is gouged in places from years of little kids climbing it. “Wait — I heard about you,” she says to it, in sudden recognition.

According to Doc, who heard it from her carers support group, it had been planted as a Pearl’s death wish. Instead of taking a trip somewhere to see something before she died the way most other donors do (because donors are very good at following each other’s leads and doing what’s expected of them,) she wanted a tree planted at the heart of the recovery center in her honor, so that everyone who went by would have to look at her and remember her. That was her idea of permanence.

Jasper lays a hand on the trunk, smiling. 

_I can respect that,_ she thinks. _She won._

It makes her think, too, of Bismuth, who wanted to take the little time she had and leave something that wouldn’t be short-lived at all.

In a way, she did. She burned down the waterfront in Dorova. They’d have to rebuild the whole thing, the boathouse and the police station, because of her, and true, usually it’s the architect who gets remembered for things like that, not the arsonist, but maybe at that point, Bismuth had stopped being fussy about details. Blame could be as good as credit, right?

Jasper’s willing to bet the garden was installed primarily for the comfort of the patients from the other side. In warmer weather, it would probably be a nice place to sit and discuss treatments or procedures with a surgeon, or for patients’ loved ones to come while they wait for news.

There isn’t any equivalent for donors.

Lapis’s last recovery center had a utility garden, she told them — fenced-in, naturally, but a place where donors could whittle away their idle hours. When Peridot visited, she came with clippings from farming magazines the way she’d brought Jasper dark chocolate, and Lapis always took her to see how the corn was doing. Apparently they’d had a pumpkin that was especially _theirs._

 _We tried making art, too,_ Peridot told her. _We picked that up from you!_

 _Kind of,_ Lapis had prevaricated, when Jasper arched her eyebrows. _Caretaker Lauren started it._

She sneaks back in, but over the next few weeks, Jasper comes back to steal time under the branches of the Pearl’s tree, just to feel the air on her face and the pale touch of sunlight. She meets other people once or twice, cutting through with their collars pulled up to their chins to keep the wind out, but she gets lucky: none of them are staff members who’d recognize an out-of-bounds Jasper and report her.

It’s on one of these occasions that she lowers herself to the ground to catch her breath and looks around, wondering what the rest of the garden will look like once Ventis passes.

A plaque on the path told her that the layout of the garden had been planned deliberately so there’d be something to look at in every season; forsythia and quince blossoms coming up first in the spring, dahlia heads the size of dinner plates bobbing in the summer, blazing autumn reds as the leaves changed. But in winter, there’s nothing to see but slush, an empty water feature, and —

One Jasper, hunched in the cold.

She presses her hand into her side, sucking in icy air through her nose. The pain’s _terrible_ today, and it’s so frustrating that she could cry, because she should be getting _better,_ not weaker. She feels disgusting and — and _corrupted,_ all down her right side, and not even the rare sight of the sky can distract her from that, like if she dug her claws in and peeled up her skin, she’d find mold and calcified growths.

And then footsteps crunch on the path.

Her head comes up, swaying on her neck, shamefully unstable.

A man walks by, giving her a polite nod when he inadvertently catches her eye — and he’s not staff, so she relaxes. He must be a patient then, she thinks, here for a consultation; he’s dressed too casually to be here on any official business. She’s already dismissing him.

But suddenly, his steps falter. He turns around.

“Excuse me,” he ventures, and takes a step towards her. Jasper opens her mouth to tell him, _I’m fine, keep going,_ because she probably doesn’t look great, except that’s not what he says. “Are you … Jasper?”

She blinks. Of all the things she expected to come out of an outsider’s mouth …

Warily, she answers, “One of them.”

He stops at the edge of the path, where the roots from the Pearl’s tree have started to distend the gravel. He fumbles through his pockets, muttering “no” and “where did I put it?” and getting progressively flustered as he checks the same pocket multiple times. Jasper stares at him, baffled. He’s a big, broad-shouldered man — they’d be the same size if she was standing, she bets. His frame tapers down towards a waist that’s only incrementally less thick than the rest of him, and his hair’s been cut recently, and not very well. It sticks up in uneven chunks. 

Finally, under his winter coat, he finds a breast pocket and his face lights up.

Pulling out a slip of paper, he unfolds it and then says, “Are you … Jasper 55.1, cut … Extra-Large-eight-Cove?”

“XL8cv,” Jasper corrects automatically, and then goes, “Who the fuck are _you.”_

Shock wipes his face clean. “Are you really?”

“How do you have my cut and number?” She puts her hand down, starting to wrestle herself to her feet so she can have some leverage, no matter how bad she feels.

His mouth works fishily, open and shut, before he collects his wits.

“I —“ His big frame suddenly drops into a crouch in front of her, putting his eye level below hers. The way he’s staring at her doesn’t make her feel any more at ease. “— My — my name is Bo Fryman. I have — I had a food shop on the boardwalk, I sold fries to — well, to seagulls, mostly, but sometimes people, too.”

He chuckles, and there’s an awkward beat where he waits but Jasper just looks at him blankly and doesn’t laugh back.

“Okay,” he clears his throat, and then sheds his winter coat and —

And starts on the buttons of the shirt underneath.

Snarling, Jasper jerks forward, drawing her fist back to deck him. She sees it hit him all at once — her size, which had been difficult to gauge from the ground, and more importantly, the considerable circumference of her biceps — and he yelps.

“No, wait!”

“The _fuck —“_

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t think how that would look!” He waves his hands frantically, pigeon-hopping backwards in a ridiculous way. “I just wanted to show you my scar!”

Jasper pauses, and surprise relaxes the up-curled snarl of her lips.

“Scar?”

He takes a deep breath, hands still extended towards her. “Okay,” he says, seemingly to himself. He takes a deep breath. “Stop messing up. I’m Bo Fryman,” he says quickly, eyes darting to her fists. “I had a food shack on the boardwalk. At the end of Mortalis, there was a leak in our gas lines, a bad spark, and it caught fire. Just — _whoosh,”_ he says it the way Eyeball does, miming it with his hands, but his expression is so bleak that Jasper’s stomach tightens. “My sons were upstairs — Ronaldo and Petey, they’re seventeen and twelve, nothing in this world is more important to me than them.”

“I’m a clone,” snaps out of her, still too on edge to temper herself. “I don’t have anybody like that.”

“If I set your home on fire, I bet you would,” Fryman fires back, serene, and her mouth snaps shut. “I went in to get them, of course. I lost my restaurant, but I saved my sons.”

Jasper looks at him. _What does that have to do with my name in your pocket?_

Fryman looks back. “I think I have your lung.”

Jasper sits down. Frost and winter detritus crack under her.

“I —“ she starts. “You — ?” 

And then:

“I thought only rich people grew us to harvest us.”

“Um,” he looks uncomfortable. “I don’t know all the details, but I think there’s a budget set aside for emergencies? Which I qualified for. My burns were manageable,” he runs his hands over his hair, grimacing, “but the real damage was from smoke inhalation. So they life-flighted me to the mainland. And the rest is — um,” he gestures at her. “Thanks to you, I guess.”

She stares at him.

Her eyes move from his face to his chest, the shirt he had started to unbutton. When she did her donation, they didn’t saw through her ribs to get to her lung and instead went in from underneath, like they were pulling the innards out of a turkey, but could you be able to put it back in the same way? Surely, after over half-a-century, they’ve discovered the most efficient processes to get this done?

She’s aware, acutely, of every breath that’s coming in through her nose. Too short — not enough, never enough anymore, like she’s always just jogged a mile to get wherever she is.

And it’s this — this poisonous feeling in her chest that’s draining her, making her crouch down like something inhuman — and what she’s missing is just one foot away from her, breathing for someone else.

For a long moment, neither of them move.

Then Fryman gets down in the litter next to her, and Jasper reaches across her body to twitch her hair out of his way so he doesn’t sit on it. He’s staring back at her with a similar expression.

It had never crossed her mind, not even once, to wonder where her organs wound up once they were taken from her — much less meeting a recipient in person, to realize there _was_ a person on the other end, with — with businesses, and _sons._ If she had, she imagines it would have felt the way Lapis felt all those years; like the people who looked at her never saw her as anything other than a mirror, with their own accomplishments reflected back to them so they could admire themselves. Even Jasper had looked at her that way sometimes, and Peridot, too. No wonder she always wanted to shatter the glass.

 _He would have died,_ she thinks. _If not for you._

Or, maybe it’s more like an hourglass. Every grain of time into a recipient’s life is a grain falling out of donor’s.

Then her mind snags.

“Wait,” she says, blinking. “Mainland?”

“Yeah,” he answers offhandedly. “I’m from Beach City, it’s a couple miles offshore and —“

Her hand shoots out, grabbing a fistful of his coat, and yanks him off-balance.

He chokes with surprise, and his face goes through the peculiar expressions unique to someone whose entire life is flashing in front of his eyes.

“ _Beach City?”_ Jasper echoes, up in his face with her teeth on display, in a voice she absolutely cannot control. “ _You’re_ from Beach City?”

“I — yeah, food shack, remember? On the boardwalk.”

“Then you know the Crystal Gems!” Her fist tightens. “You know _Rose Quartz!”_

“Yes,” says Fryman — like —

Like it’s the most _natural thing in the world._

“— although I … um, gotta talk to you about Rose.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jasper brushes it off. Her mind’s jumping ahead. “How many more times do you have to come back to the recovery center for appointments?”

“At least two more,” he answers, confused. Then a sudden sharpness comes to his eyes, like a light coming on. “What are you planning?”

Slowly, she starts to smile. The wind stirs the bare branches above their heads, knocking them against each other in a sound like whispering. Donors aren’t allowed to have visitors, of course, but it shouldn’t be hard to arrange a scenario like she thinks, not for what she needs. The confidence she feels is almost heady — it’s been so scarce, lately.

“I saved your life,” she tells him, with energy, and then because she’s feeling gracious, she adds, “The doctors helped. I know how you can repay me.”

He looks back at her, inscrutable for a moment until he suddenly isn’t. He’s thinking about his sons; the sum of his world, what he ran into a burning building for. Those he loves to the point of losing an organ.

She knows that look. It’s the same look on her face when someone asks her about Lapis.

“I’m in,” says Bo Fryman.

 

*

 

“You never did answer my question.”

“Hmm?” Lapis glances up. “About baleen whales? You’re right, I —“

“Oh — no,” says Jasper, but before she can elaborate, Lapis sucks in a sharp breath like she’s preparing to yank out an IV.

When she speaks, it comes out of her in a rush. Somehow, her words don’t stumble, like they had been rehearsed enough times to be as familiar as her own cut and number: “I thought once I got rid of you, I could run away. I thought once you were gone, I could be free. But it turned out it wasn’t you imprisoning me at all.”

Jasper’s jaw clicks shut of its own accord.

She blinks, feeling like something flat and heavy had just been swung at her face.

“What —“

Oh. Speaking of unanswered questions: _why didn’t you leave?_

“I — that’s — no, that’s not what I was asking, either.”

Rage and embarrassment both make a quick, visceral mess of Lapis’s face. Her knuckles whiten over the cover of her book, and Jasper wonders if she should apologize, she hadn’t meant to put her on the spot like that (at least not on that topic,) but Lapis wrestles her expression under control.

“Context, Jasper. We’re not joined at the brain.”

Jasper opens her mouth and closes it again. Then says, “At the Cottages, you asked me why I wanted you around.”

 _Because I decided on you,_ she’d said then, still a teenager, and it was true and not true, the way these things go. Loving Lapis never felt like a decision — it was more a part of her than her Pink heart, her lungs. It woke up with her. It ran its wrist over a chip reader, every night; here, Jasper loves Lapis Lazuli and will go wherever she goes, accounted for.

Her voice goes low, to hide the way it shakes.

“Why are you here, now?”

And she’s watching, so she sees the decision rise in her. Lapis’s face goes still, calm and undisturbed as water, and she closes her book. Its spine pops in protest — it’s an encyclopedia of sea creatures, and this is another thing that changed in the time they were apart. It’s no longer the how-to books, the boating manuals, but instead it’s “this is what you’re missing” books.

She gets up, crossing to the bed, and Jasper’s tilting into her touch before she’s even quite in range, letting Lapis’s hands card through her hair.

“We have so little,” she murmurs at last. “Nothing truly belongs to us, not even ourselves. But you — you’re mine, you’re _mine,_ and I said I would never let you go. And I’ve got the chance now, to mean it.”

Jasper takes her hand and presses it to her heart, and swallows, waiting for the steamrolled, pulped feeling to pass.

Then she says, with every last drop of Pink in her:

“It doesn’t matter where this winds up, it’s got you written in it,” and whoever gets her heart will just have to be prepared to live with that. She hopes that when she’s dead and her heart beats in someone else’s chest, it hurts without knowing why. She hopes it continues to love, and please, she thinks, please let this live, long after they’ve been harvested and there’s no memory of them beyond their cut and number recorded in some directory. Let this exist somewhere: Jasper loves Lapis Lazuli and Lapis Lazuli loves her back.

 

*

 

Once, at the Cottages, the delivery driver came around to the back and, with no explanation, dropped off a box full of old movies along with their usual crates of foodstuff.

They were all secondhand, of course, and some of the discs were too scratched up to read and had to be tossed. Watching them, you could tell by the size of the phones, the so-called fashionable shoes, and the often war-torn settings that none of these movies were _new,_ but they were new to them and that made all the difference. A very intense couple of days followed, as each household traded amongst themselves so that they could all devour this new media at once.

Among those was an action movie, something so low-budget that when they logged on to make sure that everyone on the Internet agreed with them about their opinions, it was next to impossible to find any reviews. Apparently nobody saw this movie when it came out.

It had a gruff, serious composition with gritty lighting and a score that was too good for the clunky dialogue forced into its paces alongside it. There were a lot of explosions, and nobody washed their hair.

It was the funniest comedy they’d ever seen, and in Jasper’s cottage, they all piled together on the sofas and bean-bag chairs in front of the TV and laughed themselves sick.

“ _Strange,”_ opined the main character at one point — you could tell he was the main character because every other man in the movie, from the villains to the sidekicks, all had weaker chins. _His chin fought all the other chins, that’s why he’s the hero,_ Lapis whispered to Jasper, tucked underneath her arm for warmth. Chiseled and Rugged looked away from the camera to show off his main character jaw. “ _It’s strange to think tomorrow we could die.”_

Peridot snorted loud enough to startle one of Big T’s terriers, who jerked its head up with a rattle of its tags.

“Get over it, Percy,” she said to the screen, droll.

But Paulette gazed at him like the Jaw left her starstruck, with perfect windswept curls that were way too neat to have ever _actually_ seen a coastal breeze, and she opined back, “ _But not before we live.”_

The sex that followed was supposedly passionate, frantic, and the music suggested it was the culmination of a couple different motifs, so that was interesting. But it wasn’t anywhere near detailed enough to be instructive, nor did it contain any of the consent scripts they’d been taught at kindergarten, so they all just exchanged looks of tolerant, baffled amusement as the music crescendoed.

None of them were dying yet, but the specter was in the room with them, and they knew without saying that sex in the face of imminent death probably wasn’t anything like that.

For one, Jasper learns, years down the road, you’re too damn _tired_ to get steamy about it.

For another — if you’re so worried about dying, why would you rush through the last good thing you’ve got left?

“She’s going to have to leave,” the tech nurse on night shift tells her, unvelcroing her blood pressure cuff and turning to wait for the read-out ticket to print. Identifiable by their red uniforms, tech nurses are there to monitor machinery and have always, to Jasper, seemed to take inordinate joy in telling her they can’t do anything about her discomfort, but they’ll send in the care nurse. He jerks his chin at Lapis, who levels him with her best crocodile look. “She can’t sleep here.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Jasper.

After he’s gone, Lapis drags the chair so close to Jasper’s bedside that it bumps the support rail. 

“ _She can’t sleep here,”_ she echoes mockingly, and throws her feet up on the mattress, crossing her legs at the ankle and closing her eyes. “Watch me. If I can’t, I’ll eat my stitches.”

“Lapis,” Jasper tries, but pain has left her too exhausted to put any effort into it. “Curfew.”

She snaps back, too vicious, “Please tell me when that has _ever_ worked on me.”

A beat later, she drops her feet to the floor and slips her fingers between the rail to hold Jasper’s hand in a manner that’s almost apologetic, all without opening her eyes.

The next Jasper wakes, Lapis has somehow wriggled herself in between all of the assorted heavy equipment cables, and is pressed against her at the shoulders and hips and knees. She’s got one hand under Jasper’s loosely-tied top, and that’s what woke her up; the pressure of fingertips exploring the length of her surgical scar, still sensitive even weeks after her infection.

“ _Lapis,”_ croaks out of her, throaty with sleep.

Lapis’s head jerks, startled, and her chin shifts along Jasper’s shoulder. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Why is your hand up my shirt?”

Lapis’s muffled laugh sends a tremor through them both. She scritches the tips of her nails against Jasper’s ribs, friendly, then removes her hand and tugs Jasper’s clothes back down, brushing her ribs and making them hitch, following her hands. Her eyes twinkle, star-flecked in the dark.

“Easy, there,” she murmurs.

Jasper snorts. “I don’t have the energy, but thank you, it’s flattering that you think I could.”

She laughs again, then gingerly pushes herself upright. “Look,” she says.

Hiking up her own top, she twists her torso to show Jasper something immediately familiar: a long, thin scar that makes a fishhook out of her side, following the bottom curve of her rib. Jasper’s own scar is near-identical, just scaled up in size. The surgeon had told her that internal organs have a tendency to sag into empty cavities where, say, a kidney or a lung or a uterus had once been, and so they’d be using mesh to hold everything in place. Jasper, for some reason, expects it to itch — she wonders if Lapis gets the same sensations, a phantom need to scratch.

She doesn’t need to ask which organ that’s a removal scar for.

In wonder, she says, “We both donated lungs.”

“But on opposite sides,” Lapis points out, and then, like she’d been continuing the conversation in her head, “Really? Not even a kiss?”

“My mouth tastes like death and saline backwash,” Jasper deadpans, and then licks her cracked lips, trying for sultry. “But by all means, come down here.”

“Eww _ww,”_ says Lapis emphatically, but then she laughs.

Jasper wakes one more time, to hear Lapis arguing softly with the night nurse. The word “no” comes up several times, at first politely and then increasingly not. Lapis ends the argument with a curt, “then call security, let them _try,_ but we both know they won't because I am _not_ human and I will _flatten_ them.” Then she lays back down, and presses her nose against Jasper’s crooked one in a manner that can really only be described as belligerent.

“That’s usually my line,” Jasper murmurs to her.

Her eyes flash, close enough to turn cyclopsian. “Are your bones not mine?”

Jasper’s mouth twitches. She thinks of all the times she’s unconsciously mimicked some mannerism of Lapis’s —  in conversation, in the rec room with the Rubies, even in the privacy of her own thoughts — wondering just how ingrained Lapis was, that it should seem like all she has to do is scratch and up Lapis comes. It didn’t even occur to her to wonder if the reverse was true. With a soft noise, she pushes her forehead up against hers, with feeling.

In the morning, they open the blinds and use the better lighting inspect themselves further.

She’s right: her own scar is on her left side, Jasper’s in on her right.

Lapis presses their chests together, unashamed of their nudity or the fact that it’s daytime and anyone could walk in — besides, the staff don’t consider modesty to be a trait they should have, and after Eyeball, everyone else is probably desensitized. “Look,” she says again. “I forgot about these.”

Their kidney scars are also mirrored.

Lapis traces her fingers from one to the other, their skin so close together there’s barely a gap between them.

Teasingly, Jasper makes as if to swing them around — one, two, three, _waltz_ — and Lapis catches herself on her arms without hesitation, like even after all this time her body still remembers the steps.

“Do you think between the two of us they could fuse us into one whole person?” she wants to know, her voice subterranean quiet. “Two lungs, two kidneys, one whole liver?”

“Two hearts,” Jasper points out.

“Yeah,” Lapis agrees, and surprises her by going up on tiptoes and kissing her. Jasper’s hand slides from her scar to her spine to hold her there, overlarge Pink heart pressed to Blue heart so tightly they should probably be able to communicate just like that, drumbeats from down deep.

Then Lapis abruptly pulls back, dropping back down.

“Yeah, you’re right, that’s gross,” she makes a face, smacking her lips. “Please brush your teeth.”

When Jasper throws her head back and laughs, it rocks both of them, their arms around each other and caught in the same undertow.

 

*

 

And if before, they’d been … something, desperate or hungry or obsessed, take your pick, then this, Jasper thinks, is love: when you peel back the rest of it, dump it in a vat of ice and wheel it off, this is what remains, surviving still. This is what you’d stop wars for. 

This is what you’d stop _time_ for.

 

*

 

“Okay, soldier, I gotta ask —” Eyeball says in exasperation, and then, “wait — no, lift this.”

“Do I put this down first, or —“

“— can you lift both without pain?”

“I can’t do anything without pain, Eyeball, you need to be more specific.”

“I have no idea. The elderlies in orange are supposed to be PT, but yours is clearly sleeping on the job because I haven’t seen them grace this floor with their presence, not even once. Or — ! They’re sneaking off during your appointment time because you’re scheduled for the slab anyway, so why bother.”

Jasper glares at her, and lifts both weights without flinching. Eyeball’s teeth make a sharp, triumphant appearance, and she leans back, crossing her arms behind her head.

“What did you need to ask me?” Jasper grunts.

“Why didn’t you talk to your pointy-headed carer about what’s-her-name, pendant girl?”

Jasper hikes her eyebrows up.

“— fine, Lapis Lazuli, whatever, I know things. Point still stands. You’ve got this carer and her _job_ is to listen to you talk about gross stuff, so how come you saddled _me_ with it?”

It’s possible that Jasper could have raised her eyebrows even higher, but it would take some effort. She lets the weights drop, and shudders at the rush of relief that pours through her muscles. She checks herself for any shortness of breath, any pain beyond the normal — not yet. Good. That’s an improvement over last time she did this. It _has_ to be.

“Can you imagine me talking to _Peridot_ about _Lapis?”_ she asks, droll.

“… yes,” Eyeball responds blankly. “Yes, I can.”

And yeah, maybe she could, but the truth is, she likes the idea of Eyeball having those secrets. That there’s one other person in this world who knows the truth, who will _continue_ to know the truth even after Jasper and Lapis are dead.

 _I loved her best in Callunis,_ Jasper had said to her once.

Eyeball responded with a loud retching noise, and that’s the other reason she keeps her as her confidant. The most fragile, crystal thing in Jasper’s whole life, and Eyeball handles it so casually, like there’s nothing intimidating about it. It gives Jasper permission to be less scared of the enormity of it — all these things she feels, like the way her heart swells, overfull, at the sight of the ribbons going down Lapis’s back.

_I loved her best in Callunis._

Back at the Cottages, Lapis always had always been very careful to have excuses for why she kept Jasper around. In the winter months, it was because she hated sleeping cold and alone. In the early weeks of Floris, Jasper never minded watching the storms with her for hours, long after everyone else got bored. When Aramis dried up into autumn, she needed Jasper to escort them into town to the alleyway studio, where they could dance. But in Callunis, softest of the summer months — there wasn’t anything happening in Callunis. She could have avoided her all month, and not suffered.

But she didn’t.

_In Callunis, I think she loved me, too._

“Hey!”

That’s Eyeball, jabbing her with the tip of her butter knife, and Jasper twitches away, scowling.

“Do you know what she donated?”

Jasper ticks off her fingers. “Kidney, lung, and —“

And then she stops, and frowns. Three fingers up, but the third wavers, uncertain, because she doesn’t think Lapis ever said it out loud. She tries to remember each of the scars she saw on Lapis’s body: the old appendectomy one from Hailsham, and the two that matched Jasper’s. But where was the third?

“Uterus,” says Eyeball abruptly.

Jasper blinks. “What?”

“It was her uterus. Just so you know.”

That scar would have easily been hidden under the hem of her skirt.

“How do you —“

And understanding hits her like a brick.

Her eyes go wide. “ _That’s_ how she won the game of Bluff!”

“By using your same trick,” Eyeball confirms, smiling. “Honestly, I should have known she was your Lapis, just from that.”

And of _course!_ The trick relied on the other players assuming that femininity had _anything_ to do with possessing a uterus, so Jasper could sit in the circle and lie, saying she donated hers, and everyone would look at her broad jaw and her thick shoulders and believe her. Likewise, Lapis could say the same and be telling the truth, except everyone would look at her, small and vulnerable as she always is, and think she’s lying.

“I love her,” Jasper says helplessly.

“I will _stab_ you,” Eyeball promises.

 

*

 

Peridot submits a requisition for more canvases, gets refused, and stomps down to the front desk and shames someone in the resources department into going to a charity house after work and finding some repurposed ones. These she lugs up to Jasper’s room, dwarfed by her armload and refusing help.

“I would have been fine with more panda wafers, Peridot,” Jasper tells her.

She brushes her hands off and says primly, “Yeah, you’re welcome.”

Jasper watches her make room to lean them against the wall, accordioning the cramped space even further. Lapis is perched on the windowsill, knees drawn up to her chest, but she looks up when Jasper says, apropos of nothing, “Peridot, didn’t you used to switch the labels on all the yogurts in the fridge so that when I came downstairs to make breakfast, I’d always wind up with the foulest smoothie because I had no idea what was what?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Peridot, teeth peeking out of her mouth. “I remember that.”

“Actually,” comes suddenly from Lapis’s direction. “That was me. I did that. I just … let you think she did it.”

“… oh,” says Jasper. “Yeah, actually, that makes more sense.”

A pause.

Then, “And … unscrewing the lids on everything in the kitchen when it was my turn to cook, so it would spill?”

Lapis’s shoulders hunch inward. “Also me.”

With a growing note of betrayal, Jasper presses, “And the keratin oil I spent a whole paycheck on dumped down the sink so the bottle could be used to root ivy cuttings?”

“Nope!” Peridot chirps, cheery. “That one was me. You know that stuff’s bullshit, right? They just tell you you’ve got a problem so you’ll spend the money trying to fix it.”

“ _You_ might not need it,” Jasper growls. “But your hair is different than mine!”

She shrugs. “Yeah, I know that _now._ Sorry.”

She leaves shortly after that, needing to get her paperwork done and make the rounds to her other donors, but she promises she’ll be back before the week’s out. It’s the fastest she’s ever done her circuit, and Jasper thinks she’s feeling their mortality, too, the giant ticking clock on their lives. Or she’s not convinced Jasper and Lapis won’t strangle each other if she’s not there as buffer — touching, if not for the fact neither of them have the energy.

Setting the radio to Sour Cream’s show, Jasper redistributes the canvases and starts mixing paints.

“Can I try?” Lapis asks, watching. And, when Jasper obligingly passes her palette up to her, she blurts out, “Is there a trick I should know? Caretaker Lauren always told us there was no wrong way to do art, but my gut’s telling me that’s not true and if there’s a way, I’m going to find it.”

“Start with the basics,” Jasper tells her, and smiles, struck with a sudden thought. “Like learning to waltz.”

Lapis’s eyes light up.

So they paint the way they’d once danced, color forming around each end and colliding in the middle — oranges and blues, luminous sea-green, the paint so thick in places it dries in ridges like a topographical map. They paint star maps and seascapes and a terrifying woman, who has too many teeth, no legs, and six hands that scrabble at the edges of her portrait. She resembles a mantis, crouched and waiting. Jasper, who isn’t sure they _both_ aren’t trying to make a self-portrait here, switches brushes and tries to make the features of her face less harsh. Tries to forgive her. It’s not her fault, either.

Another day, she puts old canvas fabric on the ground and does Lapis like a snow angel, filling in the edges but leaving the interior of her outline blank. She gives her wings, spilling from her back like waterfalls. Lapis kneels at her side, watching, and the expression on her face isn’t anything Jasper has words for.

“Do you suppose …” she starts to say one night, after they’ve scrubbed their nails and hunted down a roll of tape, because the adhesive holding down Jasper’s IV hookup against the back of her hand is barely sticking anymore, and even though she’s not currently receiving a drip, the care nurse is going to be annoyed if the needle pops out and she has to tap that vein again.

“Aha!” Lapis surfaces from one of the cubbies, roll in hand. They fix the port, and when Jasper gratefully sinks into the chair by the window, Lapis slips into her lap without hesitation.

“Hey,” says Jasper with surprise, letting her arrange herself and wincing when Lapis’s sharp little bones get the soft parts of her thighs.

She settles, casually tossing her legs over the arm of the chair. “Suppose what?” she says.

It takes Jasper a moment to pick up her train of thought.

“What happens to the art we after we complete?” she wonders, half-speaking against the crown of Lapis’s head. “Do you think they keep it? Sell it or put it in a gallery somewhere?”

The Jasper who’d been Carnelian’s carer redistributed her belongings after she died, but that had been on Carnelian’s express direction, trying to mimic the next-of-kin rules they’ve got in the outside world. That can’t be usual, can it?

Lapis smothers a yawn with the back of her hand.

“What would be the point?” she asks.

Jasper opens her mouth, but a sudden crash from the hallway cuts her off. The door’s closed, but judging by the sound, it had been a medcart colliding with a cleaning cart coming around the corner; there’s no mirror at that intersection. Voices rise in immediate argument.

The door opens.

Peridot slips through, the commotion covering the sound of her wrist passing over the chip reader.

Today, she’s wearing black driving gloves that close at the wrist with a little pearl button, smart black boots, and the exhausted look of the road-weary. She opens her mouth to call a greeting, then spots them together in the chair and freezes.

Lapis isn’t watching the door, but Jasper is, so she’s the one who sees it: the sudden, poisonous spike of envy that skewers Peridot’s face.

She blinks, shocked.

“Hey,” Lapis prompts sleepily. “You keep spacing out on me. What would be the point of keeping our art?”

“I — I don’t know,” says Jasper. “To prove something? That we live lives, however short they are. That we love. That we’ve got souls.”

Peridot drags her voice into the room with her, a grey and scratchy thing.

“They don’t want to hear that.”

Startled, Lapis lifts her head and then beams at her in greeting. It’s completely genuine — teeth blooming out of her mouth, seeding pinpricks of light in her eyes. The kind of smile you give to someone who’s known every variation of you that you could possibly come up with, and Jasper didn’t get a chance to warn her but knows immediately that out of everything, this smile is what Peridot needed to see most.

Her brow smooths out and the jealousy peels away, leaving certainty in its place. She knows where she fits.

“I know that,” Jasper matches her for matter-of-factness. “But what if we did it anyway?”

Stepping around them, Peridot settles on the windowsill, stretching her legs out in front of her with a relieved noise. The night traffic briefly illuminates her profile in a sweep of headlights, winking off the lenses of her glasses.

For a long time, none of them speak.

Then Peridot looks up.

“Do you remember,” she says softly, “that rumor that went around at the Cottages that if you loved someone, you could get a deferral on your donations?”

Lapis’s mouth quirks, her expression wry. 

She tips her head back against Jasper’s shoulder, and Jasper’s pain stabs bone-deep, but then again, she needed that belief more than Lapis did. Everything she ever did, she did to prove she had something of worth to give. Jasper was hanging pieces of herself in a gallery for judgment long before anyone told her about the deferrals.

Peridot laces her fingers together in front of her.

Studying the shadowy pattern this casts on the linoleum, she continues, even quieter:

“Do you want to know something funny? I’ve come across a variation of it in every ward I’ve visited. In every corner of the country, everyone wanting to know: am I the one? How in love do I have to be to prove it? But I’ve never met anyone who — who thought they weren’t _deserving._ Of that chance. Of more time.”

Jasper looks down.

The silence stretches.

“I think,” Lapis admits, very quiet. “That’s how people escape. Not the way I kept trying to do, by imagining myself weighed down with chains that I had to cut through in order to be free, but with … hope.”

The light in the room changes, night deepening around them. The noise in the hallway abates, night nurses returned to their stations until next check-in, and nobody moves; Jasper and Lapis in the chair, Peridot on the windowsill.

There’s so little time left, but this is good.

This is where they want to be.

Inside Jasper, the decision rises. It puts on its boots. It goes to work.

 

*

 

“Tell me again why our application wouldn’t have worked. For the deferral.”

“Because,” she answers with the ease that comes from having had nothing better to do for the past two years than pick apart every exchange she’s ever had with forensic detail. “When you love someone, you’re bigger and stronger and better together. _Not_ because you need to possess each other’s power, but because you’re a balm for each other’s hurts.”

A slow nod.

“And we weren’t that?”

“No.”

At that age, Jasper had loved Lapis to prove something about herself, and Lapis never even tried to love her back, since it would have just been another thing holding her down. Strangely, this doesn’t even hurt to admit; she leverages her elbow and presses down, but there’s no bruise to twinge. 

It’s honesty, tempered with compassion and understanding for her younger self.

Lapis’s eyelashes sweep with her blink. Up this close, it’s the only thing Jasper cares to look at.

“Tell me why we’re different now,” she says, low.

Jasper opens her mouth — _because we choose to be different, every day of our lives; the only way out of the bottom of the sea is up_ — and then thinks about it.

“Probably Peridot.”

And it startles Lapis into laughing, her head thrown back, her throat moving. She relaxes into her, arms looping comfortably around her neck.

“Lead by example?” she asks, much more casually, and Jasper nods.

“Kindness, peace, and love as acts of aggression in the face of apathy. That’s very Peridot.”

Lapis smiles, then leans in to press their foreheads together.

“Who would have guessed?” she murmurs. “That we grew up to be so bad at our jobs, but Peridot — she became the best carer anyone could ever ask for.”

 

*

 

“Shut _up,_ Jasper,” says Peridot, when they tell her this. “Drink your stupid prune juice.”

Jasper meets Lapis’s eyes over the rim of her cup, and they both smile.

 

*

 

She talks to the Ruby named Eyeball and the carer named Doc. She arm-wrestles the Ruby named Army to the cheers of onlookers and holds the crutches of the ex-guardian named Leggy while she greedily loads up two trays at meal time. She pulls back the hair of the Ruby named Navy as Navy vomits up her post-op pain meds, and they talk until the nurses change shifts. She reuses her canvases, trades them away, and she talks and she talks and she _talks._

Then she goes into the committee and she says, “I’ve decided what my death’s wish will be.”

 

*

 

Here’s the thing:

You are never, ever as simple as you want to be. Nobody is. 

They have always been more complex than anyone, even themselves, have given them credit for. After all, how complicated can a bunch of clones be? They don’t live long and they all wind up in the same place, dying the same way, right, so just slap an Affiliation on them so everyone knows their canned traits and let’s go.

Yet here they are.

That Lapis can talk about freedom, plan for freedom, and alienate everyone who doesn’t share her views on it, but when there’s a crack in the cage door, she can look at it and hate herself and stay frozen until it closes again.

That Jasper can learn, too late, that living up to the standards of a Pink affiliate and fulfilling a donor’s every predetermined purpose can leave her pained, and humiliated, and hollowed.

That all she wanted was to prove something — that she was worth the time.

That she could _be_ worth that. More time to live. More time that someone could choose to spend with her, more time she could spend loving someone back.

Here at the end, it’s the most precious thing she has: her time.

The committee approves her proposal.

 

*

 

Lapis doesn’t say a word to her the whole drive down, body turned deliberately away from her in the passenger seat.

It makes Jasper’s stomach knot with a vague, unnamed sense of panic, but she’s trying not to say anything about it (“please don’t punish me, Lapis, not after all this,”) because this time, she _does_ understand what’s got Lapis so angry. To walk into a committee and ask for your death’s wish is all but saying you know you’re going to complete on your next donation. It’s not _permission_ — permission to terminate can only come from your carer — but there’s an _expectation_ involved. It’s called a death’s wish for a reason.

She grips the headrests, leaning in between the seats to direct Peridot. It’s not a long drive, not like the Chalk Cliff Falls had been, and they set off so early in the morning that the roads are more deserted than usual and the sun’s just barely bumbling over the horizon. They drive directly into it, so whenever the car passes through a gap between the buildings and trees, Peridot hisses in annoyance and all but stands straight up in her seat so her visor blocks the rising light. It’s strangely bright, for winter.

Up ahead, she spots a sign. **Beach access.**

“There,” she tells Peridot.

And for the fourth or fifth time, thinks, _I can’t believe I’ve made it this far._

If there’s anywhere she expected to be stopped, it was in committee. After all, if you’ve got an ex-guardian who’s on disciplinary probation for plotting to escape, why would you okay her to ever leave the center — not only for a friend’s death’s wish, but especially for her own?

And yet, Lapis was right. Years of Jasper’s dogged loyalty to the Authority and their rules, and all it’s earned her is the apathy of a half-dozen administrators, who either don’t care to look at her record or figure her injury by itself is enough to keep her from mischief.

(Lapis is right, but _they’re_ not wrong, either.)

A rustle comes from the front seat. As with every chance she gets, Lapis has shed her hospital smock for her skirts and ribbons. The deep, dark blue pulls out matching accents in her hair and eyes.

“Why are we going to a _beach?”_ she asks. “Haven’t we seen enough of the sea?”

“This is different,” Jasper insists. “Not all beaches are the same, you’ll love this.”

It becomes obvious what she means almost as soon as they park.

Whereas Dorova had been knocked out of the cliffs through sheer force of will, leaving the town propped on its rocky shore like a castle in a fishbowl, its sister-state of Delmarva has smooth, rolling coastal fields and a lot of beachfront property. At least — according to the radio, it does. This is the first time Jasper’s seen it in person.

“Oh! Can you smell that?” she exclaims, doing the complicated ducking and unfolding it takes to get her bulk out of Peridot’s car.

“What,” says Lapis. “The sea?”

“Yes! Didn’t you miss it?”

Lapis looks at her blankly. “No.”

“Well, _I_ did.”

The carpark’s not empty, shielded from the headwind by a large outcropping of sandy-pink stone. It’s festooned with signs, same as it had been at the Falls, warning visitors about cleaning up after their pets and the hours for horseback riding and which sea snails to avoid because they’re venomous. Jasper reads all of these with a heady sense of satisfaction: she’s _here._ She’s doing something _right._

When she turns around, Peridot’s got her phone lifted — taking a picture, Jasper thinks, although her knowledge of cameras in phones is too vague to really be sure.

She lowers it and calls, “Were you really going to saddle me — the shortest person on your team — with carrying your big dumb picnic bag?”

“Of course not!” Jasper responds, indignant. 

(She had, in fact, forgotten about the bag.)

When she returns to them, Peridot’s saying to Lapis, low, “— don’t feel well, you can stay in the car. We’ll leave food or something.”

“ _NO!”_ Jasper yelps, and when they both dart annoyed looks at her, tries to soften her voice. “ _Please,_ Lapis. At least come down to the water. It’s my death’s wish.”

“Oh, really, I’d forgotten,” Lapis snaps back, but she unfolds her arms and pushes away from the car.

There’s a biking trail that runs parallel to the water the whole way down, flanked by scrappy plant life and winter-bare shrubs, and past that — dunes of sand, cresting out to either side in soft, malleable rises. Up beyond the high tide line, long reeds and grasses make their valiant stake at life, rustling against each other in the wind. Even the sea is a different color on this side of the country — less dark, somehow — and Jasper watches it foam across the sand, dragged back and forth like a gown’s lacy hem.

“You’re right, this _is_ way different,” Peridot allows.

The only other person out this early in the morning is a woman in a windbreaker further down the beach. She’s got two dogs with her, occupied racing back and forth playing fetch. Their pointed tails dash in and out of the surf.

“This way,” Jasper nudges them in the opposite direction, where there aren’t any people, just one dilapidated pier sticking out to sea. It doesn’t seem to be connected to anything, although the ocean’s doing a good job of claiming it, encrusted as it is with barnacles and green slime. You can see where fisherman come to set up — their buckets and stools have weathered patches out of the wood.

And there’s a part of Jasper that still doesn’t quite believe it, so it’s not until they’re actually by the pier — sand and sea and sky everywhere — and she sees the boat tied to the column, bobbing exactly where it was arranged to be, that her heart actually starts to race.

(How did Lapis put it? Feels like theft, using a product that doesn’t belong to them.)

But Lapis had an opportunity like this, once, when Jasper and Peridot were gone and it was her alone at the Cottages.

She froze then, but that’s not what Jasper’s going to do.

 _Go,_ she tells herself.

And she moves.

Dropping the bag on top of her feet, she turns to Peridot and says, “Give me the keys to your car. And — probably your phone, too.”

Peridot’s brows hunker together. “No.”

“The Donor Program pays for your phone service, don’t they? That means they can probably track you with it, so it needs to go. Sorry.”

“No,” Peridot says again.

Jasper wants to reply with something suitably dramatic, but that only works if they stick to the script she imagined for them.

She vents out a frustrated noise. “You’re leaving,” she says, and Lapis, who’d toed out of her shoes and started towards the surf, moving gingerly as the softer sand shifts underfoot easier than the rocky beach had, stops and pulls her sweater taut. Her eyes squint up suspiciously.

“And I promised the car as payment — either to strip it for parts or to disappear it to use for their own purposes, but it’s got to be gone soon if they want to hide their trail.” She extends her hand insistently. “I need you to leave your keys here.”

She’s aware, distantly, that she’s being too loud and she isn’t going about this the right way. Lapis and Peridot are both frowning at her, completely lost.

Peridot makes a gesture. “Why am I giving my car to bandits?”

She could sound a _little_ more sarcastic, but she’d have to try pretty hard.

“Because you won’t need it in Beach City, or wherever it is you’re going.”

 _Now_ she has their attention.

Peridot goes bug-eyed; the spray coming off the sea is already dividing her short hair into damp sections, which she claws away from her glasses. Lapis’s voice winds itself up tight. 

“Jasper, what is this?”

“It’s me,” she replies. “If there are no deferrals, then I’m going to make one. I’m delaying your donations, permanently.”

A certain slant of light hits Lapis’s eyes. “We’re running away?”

“Yes. We’ve signed out for this trip all day, so nobody’s going to miss us until evening, at the earliest.”

“But — I have leftovers in my fridge, they’ll go bad,” Peridot sounds indignant.

“I brought food,” Jasper assures her, having anticipated at least some misdirected concern from her. She hefts the handles of the picnic bag to demonstrate. “And other short-term stuff that wouldn’t be suspicious. We’ll take a boat, and the Crystal Gems will pick us up.”

Weirdly, this seems to shock them even more.

“ _You’ve_ been communicating with the _Crystal Gems?_ How?”

Okay, it’s a little satisfying to make Lapis’s voice slide all the way up and down a scale like that.

“Carefully,” she answers, dry. “Now, think fast. Is there anything you can’t live without?”

She looks between them as she says it, Lapis’s eyes sparkling back at her with growing excitement, but her words are mostly for Peridot. She watches her take a mental inventory; her car, her flat, her meager but carefully-controlled bank account and her folders cataloguing all the other donors under her care; their progress, their needs, the comforting things they like. She watches her come to terms with what it will mean, the crash landing that’s about to happen — being a refugee in an unknown land. What she’ll gain. What she’ll _lose._

 _You can go back if you want,_ is what she means. _I didn’t include you in the planning before this because I didn’t want to give you a chance to talk yourself out of it._

_But the choice is still yours, Peridot._

Because Peridot had been standing on this precipice before, when Lapis called her and said, “run away with me.”

She hadn’t been willing to do it, then, giving up everything she’d ever known for an unstable future. Instead, she’d turned to Jasper. “Guardian, please,” she’d said, and Jasper’s been living down the consequences of that decision for years.

But isn’t this, too, a part of the reason why Peridot became a carer? To gain independence and mobility — two very important skills to have should you ever find yourself in a new land.

Her eyes move, rapid.

“What about the others?” she croaks. “Who’s going to get hurt because of what we’re doing?”

It has not strayed far from her thoughts since the moment Bo Fryman sat down next to her under the Pearl’s tree and told her that yes, the Crystal Gems were interested in helping them — nervous, too, understandably, as opening their Beach City sanctuary comes with the risk of being betrayed. (There are no stories about what happens to donors who escape and are caught: the Diamond Authority makes them … disappear from the narrative.) She talked to Eyeball and Doc, Army and Leggy, Navy who is so sweet and soft-spoken the administrators don’t think twice about what they say in front of her.

“Don’t doubt a Ruby squad’s ability to sow confusion and misdirection,” is what she decides on, showing all of her teeth in a way designed to make Lapis and Peridot smile back.

Which they do, a little hesitantly.

Donors are supposed to have each other’s backs, and if there’s one thing Jasper will admit about the Crystal Gems, it’s this: their rebellion may have failed in its biggest goal, but it _succeeded_ in that it put the idea of _something else_ in the hearts of those like Lapis, and the Rubies, and all those donors who shyly approached Jasper in the rec room, or outside the imaging clinic, saying, _I heard you were arrested for trying to escape — tell me what it would be like, out there._

_Tell me what freedom would be like._

And Jasper always replied, _Freedom is feeling like you belong in your own body, at last._

She hopes someone gets to tell the Gems that — that they made that.

Even Rose Quartz.

Peridot drags in a deep breath. Her shoulders come up, and she reaches sideways, grabbing the sleeve of Lapis’s sweater with one hand.

With the other, she pulls her car keys and her phone out of her pocket, and drops them into Jasper’s open palm.

Jasper looks down, running her thumb over the teeth of the keys, the edges of the membership cards to the grocery store and fuel savers, the banged-up corners of the phone, and then she crouches, fishing through the large bag until she finds a smaller drawstring bag. She’ll leave these tied to the pier when they take the boat, as exchange. As good-bye.

Peridot and Lapis have a nonverbal moment of communication.

The woman with the dogs isn’t visible anymore. The only sounds are the waves rushing up the shore, the flapping of Peridot’s stiff green jacket, and the loud whine of a truck’s brakes from somewhere far off. Jasper’s reminded, abruptly, of all those trips into town at the Cottages; the library, the pier, the dance studio, Peridot and Lapis gripping each other’s arms, Jasper … well, Jasper holding doors, mostly.

It feels _right._

Then Peridot says, with a vast, dawning enthusiasm to match the morning rising around them, “We’re ready. We’re going to do it. Let’s run away!”

“Good,” says Jasper, and draws a knife. “Give me your arms.”

“Um,” says Lapis.

Peridot’s eyes go comically wide. “ _Where_ did you get _that?”_

“Surgical ward. Crash cart,” Jasper responds. And, “They should really put a mirror on that corner — maybe they won’t lose so much stuff.”

(“If you lose this, I will vacuum you into space,” Eyeball had warned her at that last exchange, as the knife went underhand and the painting went overhand. “No — don’t look at me like that, I _will_ find a way. Your whole _template_ will feel it on a cosmic level.”

It wasn’t the strangest thing anyone had ever threatened to do to Jasper, so she said “okay” and studied the scalpel knife now dwarfed in her hand. She’d seen them a dozen times before, peeled out of their sterilized cellophane wrapping as the anesthesiologist tried to distract her with counting, but it’s another thing entirely to have one without a nurse or doctor or student attached to the other end.

In admiration, she’d asked, “Did you really get this off a cart in the corridor?”

“ _It_ ran into _me,”_ Eyeball said judiciously. “Dangerous floor you’re on, you know. Too many blind corners.”

It’s hard enough even keeping something as small as a dietary _cheat_ a secret, how on earth — 

“— did you keep them from knowing you had it?”

“Carry a plastic knife around long enough,” Eyeball told her, “and nobody thinks anything of it when something knife-shaped appears among your treasures.”

The butter knife and the scalpel knife barely even look alike, but Jasper supposed that’s the wonder of it.

“Take good care of it,” Eyeball blurted, with a strange note in her voice. “It’s precious to me.”

Jasper looked over in time to catch the tail end of the expression leaving her face.

And she almost said it. It was right there, on her tongue.

_Come with us._

But Eyeball saw it coming. Her mouth made a terrible gash out of her face, and she gave her head a firm shake.

“I hate them,” she said quietly, and that gash widened into a smile — and kept widening, past the point Jasper thought a mouth should be able to go. The effect was nightmarish. It lit her one good eye and turned her whole face lopsided. “The Crystal Gems. Rose Quartz. I wouldn’t trust myself if I ever laid eyes on them. I _hate_ them. For how they treat us because of _them._ They rebelled, and _we_ got slabbed.”

And they’d discussed it to death — how they were going to pull it off this time without a similar punishment rebounding on the donors left behind — but Jasper still felt a frisson of fear.

“Eyeball —“

“My name is _Ruby,”_ she spat, and there she was, with all her vital organs on display. “When people say ‘Ruby’, I want to be the _only_ Ruby they think of. _I_ want to be the reason they discontinue my template. I don’t want any Ruby to be put through this again. And I’m going to do it. So you better go.”

Her small hands took Jasper’s much larger ones and closed them over the knife.

Jasper looked at them, their matching brown skin and pale nail beds, and then she turned and scooped up the lapis lazuli pendant from her nightstand.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she slung it around Eyeball — Ruby’s — neck, where it dropped to hang between her suspenders. The light winked off the pinpricks of sugar-white embedded deep in the blue stone, and Ruby looked at it and then looked at her.

“Don’t forget me,” Jasper told her gruffly.

She reached out, hesitated, then gave Jasper’s bicep a perfunctory pat.

“Whatever,” she muttered, “should have drawn an eyeliner dick on you when I had the chance.”)

Peridot gets extra-squinty.

“Do you even know how to use that?” she demands. “Wait, what _are_ we using it for?”

“Your arms,” Jasper repeats, and when they continue to look at her blankly, she says in exasperation, “Your _microchips._ I’m not sending you to sea just for the Authority to merrily track you the whole way there.”

They blink and glance at each other.

Jasper waits with her hand extended, watching them silently deliberate with each other. Peridot turns her wrists over, studying the undersides, and Lapis holds her microchipped wrist clasped against her chest. It’s the same one Jasper’s seen her swipe at a chip reader a hundred, a _thousand_ times. Her fingers tighten, and for a moment, all Jasper can see is the overlay of her own hand, covering Lapis’s wrist — hauling her over brambles, swinging her out in a dance so that her skirt belled out, pulling her across the bed to steal another kiss.

She feels a stab of nausea — this is a lot of trust you’re asking for, Jasper — and starts to pull her hand back.

Lapis’s hand snatches hers, and she lays her wrist into her palm.

“Here?” Peridot’s voice comes out strained. “ _Now?_ Don’t you need a diagram? There’s a lot of veins in a wrist!”

“There was a donor in the downstairs ward,” Jasper explains slowly. “Named Zinc. Had tattoos all over his face, and never shut up, not once in his life. Liked anatomy. Had charts hanging around his bed — skeletal and musculature. I did not pass guardian training by having poor memorization skills.”

As she talks, she tests the point of the knife, and before Lapis can tense up —

She turns the tip, cuts in deep, tilts her wrist so that the blood runs into the sand, and feels the broad edge catch under the corner of something small and square. With a single movement, she chips the microchip off the bone in Lapis’s forearm, and Lapis clamps her teeth over a high-pitched, pained noise. Easing the knife back, careful to stay parallel to the veins, Jasper squeezes with her thumb until the chip works to the surface. It’s over in less than ten seconds.

“Done,” she says.

She turns away to rummage through the picnic bag, surfacing with a sterilization pad and a gauze wrap. The latter she uses to bandage Lapis’s wrist, while Lapis and Peridot study the microchip in the palm of her other hand.

It looks no more remarkable than debris, a black fleck of driftwood washed up onto Lapis’s lifeline. Each of them had one of those sealed to their bones when they were just infants — one of the few things ever donated to _them._

Abruptly, Lapis’s hand closes over it and she steps away.

“— _hey!”_ Jasper’s not done.

The end of the gauze becomes another ribbon trailing behind her, following her as she steps across the wet sand. The foamy edge of an incoming wave washes over her toes, and Lapis turns her hand over and opens it. Jasper doesn’t see the microchip fall, doesn’t see it get washed away, but when Lapis returns to them, she’s scrubbing her empty hand off on her skirt. The look on her face is cracked-open, incandescent — a woman at the very top of a tower, realizing she has wings.

“Your turn,” Jasper says to Peridot, folding the sterilization pad and checking the knife for any spots she missed.

“What about you?”

“I’ll do mine later,” she promises. “But I’ve got to get us out to sea first, and I’ll need both hands for that. That’s too important to risk messing one up.”

Peridot lifts a shoulder. Makes sense.

“Also,” she adds, thoughtful. “It’d probably be smart not to dump all our microchips in one place. Leave a more confusing trail.”

“Exactly,” Jasper nods at her, and cuts.

Peridot’s eyes go flinty and sharp, glued like microchips in her skull — she doesn’t take them off Jasper’s face, and Jasper fights the feeling like she’s on X-ray, with all her plans coming up white like hairline fractures, visible to the naked eye. Peridot scrutinizes her, and Jasper shakes the microchip off the edge of the knife and gets to work binding her wrist before it gets too bloody. Only when she’s done does she lift her eyes.

Their gazes crack together and hold — one long moment, then another.

Moment of truth, Jasper thinks. 

How well does this carer know her donor?

(“Honestly, I was expecting an interrogation weeks ago,” she’d said, when Jasper snapped, _excuse me, I need to talk to my carer,_ and the white coat left the room. She planted her feet and braced herself, staring Jasper down. “Go on — I know you’ve got things you need to ask.”

Jasper had been momentarily wrong-footed by that, although in hindsight she’s not sure why she expected Peridot to deflect: she doesn’t treat _everything_ with irreverent humor.

Her mouth opened. “Did you keep me a secret from her?”

“Yes,” Peridot admitted, and then her breath hitched, like something long-tethered finally broke free. “Yes, I did. You didn’t know she was still alive, but she didn’t know you were still alive, either. I did that.”

And just like that, the awful fantasy that had been shadowing her — that Lapis had known this whole time, that whenever Peridot came by on her rounds they got together and laughed about it: Jasper arrested and alone and miserably convinced that Lapis was dead at sea somewhere, ha ha, we sure showed her, huh? — evaporated, and with it, most of her anger. She reached for it, but it was gone, drained out of her like it went with the pus and discharge they’ve been removing from the wound in her side.

“Why?” seemed like as good a question as any.

Peridot’s expression went droll. “Because you and Lapis don’t get the luxury of being the only ones who fucked up.”

“Hey —“

“And I fixed it. The worst thing I ever did, but I fixed it. I had her transferred. I reunited you before you completed.”

Jasper’s jaw clicked shut. She looked at her, and understanding came at her with a knife:

Peridot, who always wanted to try everything, who never wanted to miss an experience, wanted this too: to be the most important person in their lives, for once. To know what that would be like.

“You’re an idiot,” she said roughly.

“Yeah, I know. Learned from the best.”)

Peridot’s lips purse, her eyes gone disbelievingly round. Her voice gets trawled from her in jerks and starts, like it’s coming up a pulley.

“What — what do we do now?”

Jasper breathes out.

“Now, you take this,” she hands the picnic bag back, “and we do what Lapis has begged us to do for years. Get in the boat.”

Their eyes follow the trajectory of her pointing finger, and she sees them both startle as they finally register what’s tied under the pier.

It’s a rowboat, bobbing low in the water, and there’s nothing in it — no oars or motor or anything of the sort, and Lapis frowns, hiking her skirts up so she can wade out and inspect it, running her hands down the length of the wood. It honestly wouldn’t look that out of place at the Cottages; old, weathered, its paint peeling.

“It’s seaworthy,” she declares, like it’s the only positive attribute she can find.

Peridot looks dubious. “How are we going to row it?”

“Didn’t I say I’d be your escort?” Jasper says, undaunted. “Get in, and I’ll tow you out.”

She doesn’t look reassured.

“Is that safe?”

“I didn’t insist on this beach just for its stunning view.” Although after so long cooped up in the wards, anything that isn’t primary-colored walls and old linoleum is so beautiful it’s worth weeping over. “I found it on paper awhile ago — well, actually, Lapis found it. It took me a little longer to realize what I was looking at.”

Lapis stares back at them, uncomprehending. The ocean sloshes around her knees.

The next moment, it clicks.

“Wait.” She turns her head. “This is Delmarva. This is — Dewey’s shipping corridor!” she exclaims, and swivels to pin Jasper with a look. “Were you studying my research?”

“I was there when you did most of your research in the first place,” Jasper reminds her dryly, then says to Peridot, “This is the best place I could find. And I’m pretty sure the Crystal Gems found it, too, since Beach City is in —“ she takes a moment to orient herself, then points. “That direction.”

On paper, it doesn’t _look_ that safe. Conflicting currents coming from the east and the north make it seem like it would be dangerously turbulent, but in fact, this narrow waterway off the coast of Delmarva is one of the calmest in the country. Ships can come and go without constantly struggling to avoid the draw into the southern well. The main corridor is used for commercial freight, and thus is heavily monitored, but that leaves a lot of little side eddies and paths for smugglers —

— and pirates.

Jasper gives them room to digest this. She sits down and pulls off her shoes, then rolls up the legs of her pants. The water is instantly, shockingly cold.

She wades out to the boat, grabbing it by the prow and reaching up, tugging at the knot tying it to the pier until it falls apart.

“Lapis?” she ventures.

Lapis startles. Her eyes dart from Jasper to the shore — the wide, barren beach and the distant hump of rock that shields the carpark from the worst of the weather. Beyond that — the road, the town, the recovery center. And even further beyond that, the mountains and the kindergartens and Chalk Cliff Falls. The wind picks at her hair, dragging the ends of it across her mouth.

Suddenly, she barks with laughter.

“I’m already gone,” she says in wonder. “My feet aren’t on land anymore. _BYE,”_ she shouts in the direction of the shore. “I’m _out!_ You can’t have me back!”

Then she plants her foot against Jasper’s knee and uses it to leverage herself into the boat. Jasper holds it steady as it tries to buck away from her, and she settles onto the bench, grinning wildly.

“I love you,” Jasper tells her, helpless to stop the stab of _something_ that goes through her heart and clean out the other side of her. 

She wants to call it pain, because that’s what she’s used to, but it’s probably closer to joy. 

Lapis studies her for a beat, then says, “I believe you.”

She leans forward, grabbing Jasper by the ear. The kiss lands sloppily, off-center, because she has no reason to be careful, and then she’s pulling back to say, “Let’s _go.”_

“Hey!” Peridot shouts. She’s a small, antsy shape, dancing back and forth just past the surf, reluctant to come in any further. “Now’s a bad time to mention that I can’t swim, huh?”

Lapis looks indignant. “Why didn’t you say anything! I would have taught you while we were at Hailsham!”

“I _distinctly_ remember you pretending to drown people.”

“I —“

And then Lapis stops, and frowns.

“Okay, _fine,_ probably,” she admits, and together, she and Jasper turn back to get her.

 

*

 

Once, a long time ago, in a mismatched crowded kitchen worn down by years of donors passing through, a Sapphire took her aside and told her, “You need to understand, Jasper 55.1, it is _your_ responsibility to use your size and your strength _wisely.”_

 _Sure,_ that younger Jasper had thought back, resentful. _What do you think I’ve been doing?_

Coming from Beta, her size was the only thing of note about her — it was the only thing she had going for her. Why else would the guild of guardians accept her? She didn’t have anything else they wanted — trustworthy looks, trustworthy attitude, and she could barely even dress herself with the limited selection in the upcycle bin. So it was pretty rich, being told she needed to tone herself down.

But here she is.

She’s survived twenty-two years, and that Sapphire is probably dead, along with almost everyone else she’s known: Bismuth, Big T and Little T, Aquamarine and Citrine. 

Moonstone and Iron.

Carnelian.

But Jasper is _still here,_ and she thinks, _I am trying,_ at that persistent voice, telling her:

Your strength is _your_ responsibility.

_I know, what do you think I’m trying to do?_

Water sloshes against her chin.

She kicks off against the sandy ocean bottom, towing the boat out towards the breakers. Conditioned by repeated training sessions with Ruby, she takes it as slow as she dares, trying not to strain her one good lung. However, there are a ton of _other_ muscles she hasn’t been using recently, and they’re waking up and letting her know about it.

The water, by now, is deeper than she is tall, and she’s got to stretch her toes in order to remain standing. It’s taking more and more effort to pull the boat along.

(They made it look _so_ much easier than this on TV.)

She eats salt water, and listens to Peridot and Lapis’s hasty discussion: who all the Crystal Gems are and when they escaped, which scripts Lapis will need to interact with regular people since she’s woefully out of practice (“remember,” Peridot tells her bracingly, “they’re more scared of you than you are of them,”) and what they’ll need in order to start fresh.

“I only know how to cook four meals,” she hears Lapis say. “And I never bothered finding a job at the Cottages! What if I’m bad at it?”

“Let’s see what they need, first.”

There’s a pause, and then Lapis’s voice goes even quieter.

“What if … what if I’m too broken? I’ve done three donations — what if I can’t contribute because there isn’t enough of me left?”

“They haven’t harvested anything from me yet,” Peridot answers, sharp. “I’ll do it. You just be there for me.”

“I — yeah, okay.”

The boat jars against Jasper’s shoulder, and pain rips down her side. She grits her teeth, takes a steadying breath, and _heaves._

There’s silence from inside the boat.

Then Peridot says, “So how are you feeling about this?”

Lapis doesn’t answer for a long time, and when Jasper stops to catch her breath, she glances up at them. They make for two small, huddled shapes, their wrists in matching white, and Lapis rubs at her sternum, her expression wondering.

“Peridot,” she says. “My heart, my brain — the fighting in me has stopped.”

And Jasper doesn’t know what that means, but Peridot clearly does, because she smiles in a satisfied way and leans back.

“Then we’re doing the right thing.”

Movement in her peripheral catches Jasper’s attention.

“Hey!” she calls. _“Look!”_

The sun’s coming up now, a silver-limned disc of light leaving the horizon. It sneaks into the sky like a donor escaping, and through it, Jasper can just barely make out the shape of another boat coming towards them. Its engines must be off, because it drifts along silent and still, except for the person eagerly hanging forward off the bow like a figurehead.

He’s a child in a pink shirt, with curly dark hair that the wind keeps trying to drag right off his scalp.

“Who’s _that?”_ Lapis asks blankly, but Jasper knows.

And so does Peridot, when she catches up a beat later. Her eyes squint through her glasses, then flare wide open.

“That’s — !” she says, and looks at Jasper in shock.

Suddenly, Jasper’s feet find purchase on something other than loose sand, pushing her up higher in the water. She quests about with the soles of her feet, finding metal and rust and a slimy carpet of algae. Her first thought is piping — sewage, probably — but then her toes find welding shapes not typical for industrial pipes and she feels her breath catch. It’s a hull — of a ship, or something — is this from the war? It is! It has to be. It’s possible that people died in this spot, decades ago. No donor can save you from drowning.

Resolve hardens her like a Diamond. It’s now or never. She’s not going to find a better place than this.

This is the Pinkest thing she will ever do.

 _Please,_ she thinks to every Pink affiliate who has ever lived, as if somehow she could call on every one who came before her, who wore that diamond on their clothes, who died so their big hearts could keep someone else alive. 

Even Rose Quartz. Even her son.

_Please, my heart is in this boat._

_Please, let it live a long, long time, outside of me._

She takes the deepest breath her lung can manage, braces her weight against the sunken war machine, and _shoves._

The boat meets an incoming wave, and for one terrible second, Jasper thinks that her strength was wasted — that the boat’s just going to bob up and be buffeted back towards her.

But it doesn’t. It skips past the wavetop and glides on out, past the breaker line to the calmer waters, where it swerves in a fishtail spin like a toy in a bathtub. Its occupants shout to each other, redistributing its weight and slowing it to a stop. Their voices splash across the water like backwash, but there’s a high, unhappy whine in Jasper’s ears and it renders them both unintelligible.

 _There,_ she thinks with satisfaction, sagging back and letting the current tug on her.

Another shout. The Beach City boat has spotted them. 

Motor revving up, it slices over the top of the waves with sudden vigor.

She shifts her heels and gets carried forward another foot. She can feel her hair ghosting around her arms, and tilts her head back, struggling for breath.

 _There,_ she thinks again, and closes her eyes. _The worst thing I ever did, and I fixed it._

Except:

“Jasper!”

That’s Lapis’s voice, raised in a shout, and without warning, the hull ceases to exist under Jasper’s feet. She slips and braces, expecting to hit sand, but the ocean bottom on this side of the war relic is much further away than it had been on the other side, where the sediment had more time to build up. Water closes over her head, flooding her nose and mouth.

Panic hits her, and she is immediately breathless, an awful feeling like someone trying to suck her remaining lung out of her chest with a straw.

She writhes — teeth clenched, bubbles escaping —

— wanting to _scream,_ the pain is — !

Her heel strikes metal again and she shoves herself upward. Air rushes down her throat as soon as she breaks the surface. It’s like getting hit in the ribs with a mallet.

It doesn’t leave her chest. Every breath is agony.

She twists her head. _How am I going to make it back to shore?_

“Jasper!”

Treading water takes up all her attention; in spite of it, she’s sinking lower. The world sloshes back and forth, spraying colors across her vision: silvery skies, beach — boat!

And inside:

Lapis jumps up, pitching drunkenly as she underestimates how much her movement will make the boat wobble. “ _Jasper!”_

Scrambling for a hold, Peridot tries, “Lapis — she _planned_ this, don’t you get —“

“ _Don’t you dare!”_ Lapis snarls at her.

“— she’s going _back._ To lay a false trail! To _protect_ us!”

 _Like a guardian should,_ she doesn’t say.

“ _Shut up!”_

Jasper kicks, thinking if she could get picked up by a wave, it could do most of her work for her. A clinical part of her brain is telling her she’s not getting enough oxygen to her limbs — how can she? Climbing stairs was supposed to be the heaviest exertion she could do by this point in her recovery. She hadn’t thought about the boat, what to do if it wasn’t self-propelled.

She should have paid more attention to Lapis’s research.

But she’s escorted them as far as she can. Beach City was never for Jasper. Freedom wasn’t ever one of her possibilities.

Lapis? Peridot? Sure. But not her.

She can hear Peridot’s voice in her ears: _if a donor wants to complete, there isn’t much that can stop them._

The back-and-forth of the water has drug the rowboat back towards her, even without anything to steer it, and Lapis clings white-knuckled to the edge, saying urgently, “ _Jasper,”_ and, “swim after us, come on, we’ll pull you in.”

Too late, she must be realizing what’d been missing: that Jasper hadn’t included herself when she said, _you’re leaving._

“ _Please,_ Jasper, I promised.” Her voice, that low, shouldn’t carry over everything else, but it does. “I promised I wasn’t letting you go.”

Jasper kicks, trying to keep her head above water. 

_What happened to not dragging a girl where she doesn’t want to go?_ she wants to say.

If only she could just _rest_ and catch her breath …

But the world keeps folding at the edges, making it smaller and smaller. She watches it disappear with vague curiosity.

Completing must feel something like this, she thinks. With every minute that passes, there’s less of her. Everything that’s written on her, the defining parts of her life, all of it folds up and goes away, and she stops occupying so much space: the kindergartens and the Cottages, gone. Guardians and carers, gone. The handcuffs and the IVs pressing into the same bruises, gone.

Carnelian and Eyeball, gone.

The rumor that love is the only thing that stops death and Garnet’s proof —

— her Pink heart and all the love she carries in it —

It folds up into this, this one image:

Lapis. The fury on her face, and her outstretched hand.

Gone.

 

*

 

The water closes over her head.

 

*

 

...

 

*

 

There’s a moment — and if there’s one thing donors know how to do, it’s how to make the most of a single moment — where _nothing_ hurts.

And then —

 

*

 

…

 

**International Waters**  
**Year ???**

 

“Wow!” He picks up one foot and then the other, trying to shake out his shoes. His feet squelch when he puts them back down. “She’s heavier than I thought she’d be!”

The woman in blue doesn’t look up — water drips off the end of her nose, her hair plastered sideways and clothes twisted out of shape as puddles form all around them. She doesn’t have shoes at all.

Distractedly, she tells him, “Yeah, hearts are heavy things to carry. It’s why we sink when we swim.”

“I don’t think that —“ starts the small, green woman, but her teeth start chattering too hard for her to finish. She presses herself back against the railing, her hands white-knuckled around the life preserver. She can’t be as cold as them, he thinks, she’s not even wet. He frowns and wavers, wondering if someone needs to tell her it’s all right. She’s safe now.

They’re _all_ safe now.

But —

Her friend pulls herself, mermaid-like, the short distance across the deck so she can drag the unconscious woman’s head into her lap, impatiently shoving wet strands of hair out of the way.

“Come _on,”_ she mutters, in a voice that cracks. “Jasper!”

Watching her hands move with the restless uncertainty of someone who has no idea what to do now, a sudden cold possibility steals over Steven.

“Is she … going to be okay?” he asks, looking at each of them in turn — one woman in blue, one in green, one unmoving in orange.

Nobody answers.

He swallows, and his heart turns over in his chest, as leaden as one of the dumbbells that Amethyst keeps in the den for weight training, impossible to carry for any length of time. He knows _exactly_ what she means. 

Throw him overboard like this, he thinks, and he’d go straight to the bottom.

 

*

 

Once, a long time ago, before anyone had sat him down and told him about donors and harvesting and where he came from, Steven wanted to go looking for seashells and went to each of the gems, begging them to take him.

The beaches on this side of the continental current aren’t conducive to shell deposit, not the way it gets on some of the southern islands where the whole economy is based on as many beach-related attractions as can possibly be advertised, but he didn’t know that then and thought that the rare, dime-sized scallops he found occasionally were priceless and interesting beyond belief.

So when the waves retreated and he saw the pointed edge of a conch shell sticking out of the sand, he couldn’t believe his luck.

Heart tripping with excitement, he beelined right for it, but when he crouched down and flipped it over, something slimy fell out.

He leapt back.

“Pearl!” he yelled, horrified. “ _Pearl!”_

Drawn to his shout like a kite pulled in by the string, Pearl materialized beside him, bending her legs to crouch in the same ungainly way herons do.

“That’s a hermit crab,” she said to him. Then, looking down at the brown, unmoving lump, corrected herself, “Or, actually, I have no idea what that is. But I read a lot on the Internet about hermit crabs when your dad was discussing pets — remember? — so they’re what I know most about.”

His mouth wobbled. “Did I hurt it?”

“No, it’s been dead for awhile, Steven. It’s not your fault.”

“Okay,” he said, not quite believing her.

Her mouth hooked in the corner. “Here, walk with me. We’ll let the sea claim it.”

She stood, and he fell into place beside her, keeping himself between her and the wind out of habit. The trailing ends of the bow tied around her waist had a tendency to smack him in the face, otherwise. (He _still_ hopes he’s going to grow out of that.)

“What was it doing?” he asked her, turning over the damp, salty conch shell in his hands. He felt bad, all of a sudden, for taking it. “Was it hiding in here?”

“It lives in there. Hermit crabs — and other sea creatures, too, I’m sure, but I can’t think of any at the moment — carry their homes with them everywhere they go.”

Well, now he felt _really_ awful.

How would he like it if someone came in and tore the temple away? Where would he sleep? Where would he keep his Crying Breakfast Friends?

He didn’t realize he’d stopped walking until Pearl backtracked, coming to stand in front of him. She bent down. Her hands closed over his, curling them around the shell, sea-chilled and sandy.

“How about,” she offered, not unkindly. “I tell you everything I know about hermit crabs, and you pick the most interesting parts — don’t look at me like that, Steven, I’ve seen you falling asleep when I’m teaching sometimes —“

“— that’s why I ask you to tell all your stories twice! You say so much I can’t keep it all at once —“

“— and you can tell Amethyst all about it when she calls?”

Steven brightened, the dark cloud of worry momentarily scattering away.

Amethyst _loves_ hearing about everything weird and gross, she would love this, too!

Talking with her is always the _best,_ because he can drag the stool over to the little red phone mounted to the wall by the breadbox, and curl the cord around his fingertip. Her calls only lasted as long as she had coins for the pay phone, but she told him the best stories and did the best voices. He sure did hope she could come home soon so he could hug her in person.

(“Why can’t she come NOW?” he’d asked Pearl once, watching her frown as she fills in their diet sheets. It was either that or ask why she keeps printing more of those out whenever Sapphire isn’t around, because Sapphire keeps methodically shredding them into little, tiny pieces whenever she finds them. (“Rose wouldn’t want you to do it, Pearl. We don’t _have_ to anymore.”)

“She’s still growing,” had been her response. “Same as you.”

Which wasn’t much of an answer at all.

“She doesn’t think she’s worth it,” he overheard Sapphire say to Ruby another time, while they were rearranging the freezer. Sapphire wasn’t letting Ruby handle anything because “your hands are too warm, everything melts,” to which Ruby said, “oh, yeah?”, and they giggled, and that was kind of cute.

“Why not?”

“That we’d take her when there are so many others we can’t take. She wasn’t made for abandonment — to be abandoned, or to do the abandoning. It’s not in her nature.”

That still didn’t explain why she couldn’t just come for a visit and decide from there, but Steven didn’t know about the kindergartens or the Cottages then, and Ruby nodded like that made sense.

“I hope she makes up her mind,” she said. “She’s going to start donating soon.”)

And it’s not that it’s strange, what hermit crabs do, Pearl told him that day. People do the same thing.

They were meandering past the abandoned carnival grounds by then. At the time, Steven didn’t have any context for those, and he won’t for years, so to him, it all seemed completely natural: the eerie, husked-out remnants of the postwar boom, these places built anticipating a rush that never happened. Phantom fairgrounds and towers built for a phantom people. It wasn’t weird. It was home.

“— they’ll talk and they’ll talk about how they can’t wait to go somewhere else, and see everything, and be everything except what they are, but when it comes down to it — when they get away, thinking they’ll find what they’re looking for … it turns out the home they’re craving is what they’ve carried with them all along.”

Steven looked up at her, and felt like he probably knew what she was saying. “Is that what it was like for you?”

And Pearl startled, her sharp-edged profile swinging down to him.

Then the lines of her face went soft, all at once, and she said, “Your mother carried me on her back, for awhile. When we weren’t sure where we would settle. I told her it might be easier for two fugitives to disappear separately, and she said, ‘not on your life, Pearl.’ I … think about that a lot.”

Steven grabbed her hand. “I would carry you, Pearl,” he said earnestly, and if she went a little stiff, that was okay. She knew what he meant.

 

*

 

“Stu-ball!” Dad calls, bumping him back into the present — the boat, Delmarvan waters, and three donors whose lives are in his hands. “Do we got them? Is she breathing?” His voice wobbles nervously. “Does anyone know first aid?”

This snaps the woman in green out of her paralysis. Shoving her glasses up her nose, she announces briskly, “I do.”

She pushes herself upright and moves to join the other two.

Her friend the Olympic diver keeps up a steady, berating stream of words. Steven isn’t sure where she gets the breath for all that, but she’s on a roll, her voice in pieces and sliding everywhere.

“— can’t _believe_ you,” she’s saying, her hands a restless cradle for Jasper’s unresponsive head. “Of all the _stupid_ things to do — aren’t you sure you shouldn’t have been Blue?”

“Lapis, move.”

“No,” says Lapis.

“Then help me get her flat on her back. Please.”

A beat, and then she relents.

Steven hovers, anxiously wondering how he can help. He doesn’t know them, but they’ve got to be competent if they’ve gotten this far, right? The way Lapis had stepped onto the rail of the rowboat and dove reminded him of the way terns looked, trim wings folded into an arrowhead shape as they plunged at fearless speed into the waves.

Behind him, Dad muffles a swear word, and the motor cuts out.

Steven looks away (“ABC,” the green woman’s saying, seemingly more to steady herself than her companions, “airway, breathing, circulation. You clear any obstructions from the airway first, hurry —“) and hurries to his dad’s side by the controls.

“I knew we should have listened to Sapphire,” Dad tells him in an undertone, pulling his hat off so that he can scratch at his scalp. His mouth makes a helpless shape. “This model’s too new and too different. I’m kind of just guessing on how to drive it here, bud.”

“Mr. Fryman was right, though,” Steven feels the need to point out. “We’re much less suspicious taking his boat than Garnet’s. He comes down this way all the time to go fishing — or he did.”

“I know, it’s just — talk about pressure!” He raises his head to glance in the direction of the gems. “How are they? Is she going to …”

“I don’t know,” Steven says honestly. Then, “Dad, what do we do if she dies?”

For a long beat, Greg Universe says nothing. He rubs at his stubbled chin with the back of his hand, frowns at the controls some more, and then his eyes slip sideways — towards the railing.

Steven’s voice hitches. “We are _not_ dumping a dead body overboard!”

A sudden heavy silence lands on deck, hard enough to make a sticky mess.

There’s no sound from the front of the boat, and Steven’s almost afraid to look — he doesn’t want to see what kind of expression will be on Lapis or Peridot’s faces. “It’s rude — and bad for the environment,” he adds, whispering now, and Dad widens his eyes warningly.

“Hey — whatever your name is — !” Peridot calls. “Do you need help? Lapis can drive a boat! Can’t you, Lapis?”

“It’s okay!” Dad calls back, when Lapis doesn’t volunteer an answer. “It’s probably something really stupid. Like I need a Wifi signal or something — everything needs a Wifi signal these days. Hey, yeah, maybe I’ll call Fryman and see if he doesn’t have an app to remote start this. You guys focus on what you’re doing!”

At a loss, Steven goes below decks to find blankets, because blankets are always helpful.

When he comes back up, he sees Peridot has a bloody knife in her hand.

“ _Ah!”_ Steven yelps. “What — !”

She spares him a distracted glance, then goes back to squinting at something in her other palm; small, squarish, and smeared poppy-red.

“— going to be so angry,” she mutters.

And she cranks her arm back and pitches it out to sea.

His eyes track from her to Lapis, who’s deftly twisting the unconscious woman’s wrist in gauze, but not before Steven glimpses an ugly gash, which he then connects to the knife. Blood oozes from it with enthusiasm, staining the gauze.

Understanding flashes him in the face. Gems come microchipped, don’t they?

At least they’re not pumping at her chest anymore.

“Who’s going to be angry?” he wants to know, draping a blanket around Lapis’s shoulders and throwing another across the orange woman — even when he tugs on the corners, it doesn’t cover her all the way. The blankets are pink, patterned with sugar-colored stars, and her feet look kind of funny, poking out from under the end. She doesn’t have shoes either.

“She didn’t want to survive,” Peridot answers with a matter-of-factness that reminds Steven of Sapphire. “And now she has to.”

Lapis shifts, pulling her head up onto her lap again — Jasper, her name is Jasper, Steven is resolutely _not_ going to call her Bigfoot, just because she’s huge and has a lot of hair, that’s rude — although maybe as a nickname, later, when they’re comfortable with each other — wait, do gems (donors? Is that what they call them?) even know about Bigfoot? Do they teach urban myths in their creepy kindergartens? Oh, man, if they don’t, he’s going to have to call Connie, she knows _all_ of them — woah, _focus,_ Steven! — and Peridot’s crouched beside her, fingers in her pulse, face hardened with concentration.

“Do you hear me, you clod?” she says to Jasper fiercely. “You were _wrong_ and now you have to live with it!”

Steven looks from her face to Lapis’s and back again.

“We can help with that,” he says gamely. “We’re all wrong about things, but we get the chance to learn and grow. Or we _should._ Everyone deserves a chance to be better!”

When Fryman came to the temple weeks ago, explaining that the woman who donated her lung to him had two friends she wanted to break out of a recovery center and could they help, Pearl immediately crossed her arms and said no. That had “TRAP” written all over it.

She said, _That never happens. Donors don’t ever get contact with their matches for exactly this reason. She’s lying to you, because you feel like you owe her an unpayable debt. I’m sorry, Mr. Fryman, but you’re not the most astute of humans. They must guess that we’re here and they’re trying to lure us into revealing the location of our base._

 _I’m pretty sure they already know that,_ Fryman pointed out, unruffled. _Or, at least, the one I talked to did._

Everyone looked at each other, alarmed.

Except for Steven. He wasn’t as worried as they were. Beach City is full of hidey-holes, it’s why his mom decided to put roots down here, so Pearl could do her research and Garnet could take her boat and equipment out to pirate radio waters and let the whole country know what they did wrong, letting the Donor Program happen.

 _She sounds Yellow-affiliated,_ Ruby added. _I don’t trust Yellow Affiliates, they’ve got hearts as shriveled as walnuts._

_That’s not —_

_The original Jasper and the original Rose Quartz were friends,_ Amethyst blurted out, and everyone swung on her in surprise, because how did she know that? _Same as me! That’s got to be written in her blood same as it is mine, I want to meet her. I — I don’t want us to stop saving donors just because …_

She trailed off, and there was another one of those sticky silences where everyone tried to look at Steven without looking like they were looking at Steven.

Then Sapphire said, _We all know what Rose would want._

“That’s what’s so _great_ about us!” Steven says now. “Every day we’re crystal — something entirely new!”

Behind him, the motor roars to life again, and the boat jerks, swings, and then rights itself. A shout of triumph comes from the tiller, and Steven looks back. His dad salutes him.

“Does he need help?” Lapis asks politely. “I know this boat. Or — at least, I read the manual for an older model once, cover to cover.”

“I’ll ask,” Steven says, but he can tell she doesn’t want to move.

Another glance back, and this time he signals, _hurry!_ Dad nods, the delight on his face shifting into seriousness. _Right._ Three fugitives. A medical emergency. He pushes for speed and the boat skips over the current like a rock pitched with a giant’s throw, water scraping the bottom with a sound like a saw. The spray coming off the sea stings, all fragments of broken glass, and Steven hunches down to present a smaller target. Peridot seeks refuge in her original spot by the life preserver. She removes her glasses, wipes them down on the hem of her shirt, and puts them back on — only to get splattered with droplets again almost instantly. He can’t help grinning as she scowls.

He slides in next to Lapis, who doesn’t look at him when she says, “Do you know what’s funny?”

There’d been a joke in the Cookie Cat Movie that Steven has been telling everyone who’ll stand still long enough to hear it, but he doesn’t think that’s what she means.

“No, what?” he asks.

“I tried to run away once, when I was seventeen. I thought I would steal a boat and make a dash for international waters — I didn’t think about how I’d live, or what I’d do.” Lapis’s body bends as she speaks, until she’s almost double, upside-down over Jasper’s head. “Jasper chased me down and dragged me back. Told me it wasn’t her problem that I wanted to die, but it wasn’t going to happen on her watch.”

“That’s not funny at all,” Steven says, horrified.

But Lapis isn’t talking to him. Not really. 

“Not on my watch,” she murmurs, her mouth touching Jasper’s brow. “Are you listening? I’m the guardian now.”

Steven peers closely at Jasper’s face, trying to see if there’s any reaction.

“Do you think love can stop death?” Lapis’s voice is getting stranger.

“Uh,” he fishes around for an answer, feeling increasingly out of depth. “Probably not? But I bet it can delay it.”

“A deferral,” Peridot interjects.

Steven nods. “Sure, yeah.”

He’s thinking ahead, to when they pull in at the Beach City marina. Connie’s mom runs a clinic that’s the closest thing they’ve got to an emergency room, but they’ve always taken gems to Nanefua, Kiki and Jenny’s grandma — she’d been a nurse in the war. If anyone could be trusted to save Jasper’s life and not turn her in, it’d be her.

Lapis is still talking, fast and repetitive, and it isn’t until he concentrates that he can make out the words.

“Look at me,” she’s saying. “Look at me. Look at me.”

Her voice wavers, equal parts commanding and desperate.

“Look at me, _please,_ Jasper. I’m — I’m looking at you, are you looking at me?”

And Steven thinks of Pearl, saying, _For some people —_

_For some people, home is what you carry with you into every new place. You carry it on your back, where everyone can see it but you._

Reaching forward, he picks one of Jasper’s big hands up off the deck, and holds it between both of his, pressing down until he can’t tell if the warmth comes from Jasper herself, or his own force of will. He holds on anyway, and waits.

He looks up, and around them, the sun lifts. The sky and sea change color.

It takes the day by the hand, gentle, and pulls it into the new world.

 

 

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this was "the worst things we ever did" (which, btw, is one of the tracks from the score, so if you ever get the chance to check it out, rachel portman did the music for the movie and it's Tragic™,) but if the whole point is that _they're_ better than their worst mistakes, then so are you and so am I and I needed a different title.
> 
> Thank you for reading! I'm over on [tumblr,](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/160470312950/hello-jaspisweek-its-day-3-its-movie-night) if that's a thing you're into!


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